THE FINE ART OF GIVING

In the game of life, some believe, accumulated wealth is the way the score is kept. Thus it’s not enough to count your blessings in multimillions of dollars and want for nothing. It matters who is ahead and who is falling behind, as calibrated by Forbes magazine’s annual listing of the 400 richest Americans. Or so billionaire Ted Turner believes. Last summer he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “That list is destroying our country,” claiming that the “ole skinflints” are so afraid of slipping down the Forbes list–“their Super Bowl”–that they hoard, rather than share, their wealth.

Turner issued a challenge: rank the biggest givers instead of the biggest getters. Last week Microsoft’s online magazine Slate took him up, launching the Slate 60, a list of the largest charitable donations in the country by families or individuals gathered from publicly available sources. These are numbers, and deeds, well worth highlighting. Last year Americans gave a record $143.9 billion to charity, with more than 70% of households contributing. The richest one-half of one percent of households were responsible for 11% of all giving.

The Slate 60, which will become an annual event, is a work in progress that follows some rather arbitrary rules, and new details are coming in daily. (Slate will publish an updated version in January.) The list omits anonymous gifts, which means at least 12 very big-ticket donors are missing from its 1996 ranks. It also excludes gifts by corporate foundations rather than individuals, and any gifts less than $1 million. Judging by a single year’s giving, rather than by a lifetime of charity, causes distortions too. Microsoft head Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett, for instance, have said they intend to give away most of their money in the end. And Turner, who became vice chairman of Time Warner in October, did not make the initial list, even though he has made gifts totaling $200 million in the past few years. Still, if the Slate 60 works as Turner predicts, that could be his greatest gift of all: making conspicuous giving the newest status symbol for those who have everything.

SLATE’S TOP 10

1. SAMUEL SKAGGS and ALINE SKAGGS This Utah grocery-and-drugstore magnate and his wife gave $100 million to San Diego’s Scripps Research Institute to establish the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, which will study new approaches to pharmaceutical design. The Skaggs donation matches the largest gift ever made by an individual for medical research, a $100 million donation to the University of Utah made by chemical-industry executive Jon M. Huntsman in 1995.

2. GEORGE SOROS The financier, who fled Hungary in 1956, gave $50 million to create the Emma Lazarus Fund to help legal immigrants become U.S. citizens, nearly $15 million to help change the nation’s drug policy and at least $35 million to charitable projects in Russia. (See also Susan Soros, No. 7, below.) Total: $100 million.

3. KLAUS G. PERLS and AMELIA PERLS These Manhattan art dealers and collectors gave at least $60 million worth of 20th century masterpieces by Picasso, Modigliani, Braque and Leger to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

4. ROBERT W. GALVIN The chairman of Motorola’s executive committee pledged $60 million to the Illinois Institute of Technology.

5. PRITZKER FAMILIES The Illinois Institute of Technology got another $60 million pledge (over five years) from Robert A. Pritzker, a 1946 graduate and the chief executive officer of the Marmon Group, an international conglomerate based in Chicago, and his brother Jay A. Pritzker, a Chicago attorney.

6. GONDA (GOLDSCHMIED) The donor’s full name is being kept private, but he gave $45 million to UCLA to create the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. This is the largest charitable gift from an individual in University of California history. The donor was described in a ucla statement as having long been committed to advancing medical progress against disease.

7. RICHARD FISHER, SUSAN SOROS and LEON LEVY These three trustees gave a total of $42 million to New York’s Bard College, a gift that allows the school to more than double its endowment. Fisher is chairman of the Morgan Stanley Group Inc. Levy is general partner of Odyssey Partners, an investment firm. Susan Soros, George’s wife, is the director of Bard’s Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, based in Manhattan.

8. ARISON FAMILY Lin Arison, wife of Carnival Cruise Lines founder Ted, gave $40 million worth of Carnival Corp. stock to Miami Beach’s New World Symphony, which was created in 1987 by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and Ted Arison to educate young musicians.

9. ROBERT M. BASS and ANNE BASS A $20 million donation from the 1970 Yale University graduate and his wife will help renovate Yale’s aging residential colleges. The Basses also gave $10 million to Duke to enable the university to make chairs for full professorships available for only $1.1 million instead of the usual $1.5 million, with the hope of persuading other donors to endow professorships, and $1.4 million to bring these professors together in a group known as the Bass Fellows. Total: $31.4 million. Previously the Basses have given $25 million to Stanford and $20 million to Yale (Robert Bass attended both schools).

10. BILL GATES The Microsoft mogul gave $15 million to Harvard University, where he dropped out. This is part of a joint $25 million gift with Microsoft executive vice president Steve Ballmer–a Harvard graduate–to benefit research and teaching in computer science and electrical engineering. Of this, $20 million will be used to construct a research and teaching facility named after the donors’ mothers. The remaining $5 million will endow a professorship. Gates and his wife, Melinda French Gates, also gave $12 million to the University of Washington to help pay for a proposed $52 million law school building that will be named after Gates’ father William, who graduated from the law school in 1950. Total: $27 million.

For full list, visit slate.com