Billionaire Len Blavatnik Lets Money Talk at Young Scientists Awards
- Three researchers received $250,000 grants from his foundation
- Paul Singer, Sandy Weill among those attending New York gala
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Philanthropy gets complicated. Having one’s name etched in stone or being feted at a gala can come across as vainglorious. Anonymous giving lacks transparency and makes it difficult to build the social networks that often help a project succeed.
Len Blavatnik, a U.S. and U.K. citizen born in Odessa, Ukraine, with a net worth of $25.3 billion, has his name on plenty -- a hall at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the first tier at Carnegie Hall, the school of government at Oxford. But at a New York dinner Monday to present the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, he avoided the spotlight in a conspicuous way: by never saying a word into the microphone.