Matt Levine, Columnist

Philanthropy and Power

Also short selling controversies, SEC bickering and activism in Asia.

June 4, 2015 at 12:07 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Somewhere near Boston.

It's possible that there's a secret club of billionaires competing to give tons of money to the philanthropies that make people angriest. The Koch Brothers and George Soros could be co-presidents, and John Paulson shot to the top of the league table in 2012 when he gave a $100 million tax-deductible donation to his backyard. But he was recently eclipsed when Steve Schwarzman gave $150 million to Yale for a student center, apparently to get back at Harvard for rejecting him. Dylan Matthews at Vox conceded that Schwarzman's gift was "definitely better than using the money to set up a private island upon which to hunt man for sport," but otherwise the reviews were pretty negative.