Nearly 11% of the World’s Billionaires Gave to Fight the Pandemic

In the first five months of the year, nearly 11 percent of billionaires worldwide made donations or pledges toward efforts to combat Covid-19 and to help those who have lost jobs or faced other crises in the pandemic, and over 15 percent of those who committed gifts to such efforts are under 50, according to a new report.

In addition, 71 percent of the billionaires who donated to programs to fight Covid-19 tended to be younger, wealthier, and more likely to have created their own fortunes than the billionaires in the study who gave to charity but not necessarily to efforts to fight Covid-19, say the report’s authors.

The study, Wealth X Billionaire Census 2020 , found that the worldwide billionaire population and its wealth increased in 2019 by 8.5 percent and that more than half of the world’s billionaires give to charity.

Among the study’s other findings:

• Nearly 60 percent of women billionaires in the study listed philanthropy as a top-ranking interest, passion, or hobby, while 50 percent of the billionaire men said the same.
• Slightly more than half of the billionaires around the globe are age 50 to 70, and their average age is 65.9.
• Just over 88 percent of the world’s billionaires are men, and nearly 12 percent are women.
• While China’s billionaire population grew the most rapidly of all countries last year, the United States is still home to the largest number of billionaires in the world.
• New York had the most billionaires (113) who called the city home in 2019, followed by Hong Kong (96), San Francisco (77), Moscow (73), and London (66).

To learn about big donations from U.S. donors, see the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated weekly, and our annual Philanthropy 50 report , which tracks the biggest U.S. donors’ annual giving going back to 2000.