The billionaires who would rather fail in public

In 2012, a foundation in Singapore paid for a study it knew would embarrass its own government. The findings ranked the city-state 29th out of 45 countries in how well it served its youngest children, a blunt verdict on a wealthy nation that prided itself on getting things right. The foundation published it anyway.

“Preschool was the Cinderella of our education system, neglected compared to her primary and secondary school stepsisters, burdened by poor salaries, low status, and wide disparities in quality,” said Lee Poh Wah, chief executive of the Lien Foundation, which commissioned the report. “Driven by urgency, or desperation, we commissioned two reports to expose the reality and spark reform.”

It worked, eventually. 

Government preschool spending in Singapore rose fivefold, from about $291m US in 2012 to roughly $1.4bn in 2021, and Mission I'mPossible, a national screening programme built on the foundation's own pilot, now reaches some 60% of the country's preschoolers.

Getting there took a decade. The foundation's first pilot aimed to reach 60 schools; it managed eight. Making Singapore look bad in print wasn't an accident along the way. It was the strategy.

The Bridgespan Group turned that into a thesis. 

The nonprofit consultancy to major philanthropists spent months interviewing family principals and researchers across Asia, Europe and the Americas for a report titled High-Impact Family Philanthropy: What Makes Family Giving Distinctive. 

Its point is blunt. 

Wealthy families, freed from the boards, shareholders and election cycles that constrain governments, corporations and even most charitable foundations, are the ones willing to fund the unproven idea, sit through the failure, and stay on even when everyone else has walked away and left beneficiaries stranded.

Thirteen of the world's 20 largest institutional funders are private foundations tied to founder or family wealth, according to Bridgespan's companion ranking of institutional givers, making up for $18.6 billion in giving in 2024, combined. In Asia the tilt is sharper. Eleven of the region's 20 biggest corporate givers are family-linked, against four of 20 globally.

Asia's single biggest corporate giver isn't one of them. 

Bridgespan's current ranking of the world's 20 largest corporate givers, built on average annual giving from 2020 to 2024, puts the Hong Kong Jockey Club and its Charities Trust (whose website is pictured above) at $774m, the most of any corporate donor in the region and eighth-most in the world. 

The club has been climbing. 

Bridgespan's previous edition, published in September of 2025 based off of 2019 to 2023 figures, had it at $575m and ranked 10th. That edition also files the club under “Other”, the same catch-all it uses for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, rather than treating it as a family business. A separate Bridgespan ranking, of the world's largest institutional funders, counts the Charities Trust on its own. About $705m a year averaged over 2020 to 2024, good for 11th globally. Same organisation, two different rankings, and neither categorisation is a family.

Bridgespan's own definition of family philanthropy is loose enough to fit almost anyone. Two siblings splitting a cheque book count. So does a professionally-staffed foundation still answering to the founder who wrote the first cheque.

Family philanthropy is often better positioned to bear the cost of failure and to support areas with higher uncertainty.

That kind of authority buys two things most funders can't have together. Speed and patience. 

Families can move before an idea has any evidence behind it. They can also stay committed long after a normal grantmaking cycle would have ended. “Family philanthropy is often better positioned to bear the cost of failure and to support areas with higher uncertainty,” said Lan Yuxin, an associate professor at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management in Beijing.

Through trial and error

“Spectacularly unsuccessful.” That's how Rohini Nilekani describes her first venture, a road-safety nonprofit called Nagarik. She's chair of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies in India now, and she treated that failure as data rather than embarrassment: her family's giving pivoted toward community-led water and sanitation work, and Arghyam, the organisation she founded afterward, now runs a groundwater program that reaches 26.5m people across India.

Nilekani is also the only one. 

Asked how many of the more than 20 interviews it conducted turned up a failure they never recovered from, as distinct from a slow success, Bridgespan told Pioneers Post it found no other interviewee who put it in those terms, and had no second named example to offer. On the record, the thesis has one name attached to it.

In China's Fujian province, Zhang Yiming bet $150m on one city, Longyan, his hometown of Longyan. Since 2021, the ByteDance founder has poured that money through two vehicles into the local education system. Teacher training for more than 50,000 educators, recognition awards for over 1,000 outstanding teachers, a vocational and arts lecture series that has reached 6,000 parents and educators, and technology upgrades at more than 100 education organisations. Every one of those figures counts an input. However, none of them says what changed for a student.

Marcel and Cynda Collins Arsenault took a long view with a much shorter runway. 

The couple has committed roughly 98 percent of the fortune they built through the U.S. real estate firm Real Capital Solutions to philanthropy, and moved their foundation into Colombia in the earliest days after the 2016 Havana peace accord ended more than five decades of armed conflict. Their program, PASO Colombia, helped build agricultural collectives that created about 2,370 jobs paying roughly 30 percent above minimum wage for demobilised former combatants trying to reenter civilian life. By 2020, 71% of community members surveyed said their trust in ex-combatants had grown, against about 15% in areas the program never reached. “Just as venture capital can effectively de-risk investments for public markets,” Arsenault has said, “philanthropists can de-risk solutions to global problems for governments and international organisations.”

Just as venture capital can de-risk investments for public markets, philanthropists can de-risk solutions to global problems for governments.

Over in Brazil holds the world's third-largest prison population, more than 670,000 people, with recidivism near 40% nationally. 

The Brenninkmeijer family, descendants of the founders of the retailer C&A whose businesses today run through the holding company COFRA, spent decades building the kind of credibility that gets calls returned in Brasilia, then spent it dragging a prison-reform model out of obscurity. A rehabilitation program called APAC had quietly shown it could do better, but lacked the institutional weight to spread. 

Porticus, the family's philanthropic arm, spent years convening government officials, funders and formerly incarcerated people around the model, work that fed into a 2024 Supreme Federal Court ruling creating the Pena Justa Plan, a national prison-reform framework. Ninety-three APAC programs have since been added inside Brazil's public prison system, where recidivism runs around 14 percent at roughly a third of the cost per inmate.

Jeremy Grantham skips the separation between philanthropy and everything else he owns. 

He co-founded the investment firm GMO in 1977 and still chairs its board; for nearly three decades he's steered family money into climate work through grants, “patient capital” for unproven technology, and, once a business model finally matures, ordinary commercial investment. GMO alone directed $2 billion between 2017 and 2023 toward companies working on climate mitigation.

The Skoll Foundation has deployed more than $1.3bn since 1999. Roughly 80% of its endowment now sits in investments aligned with its mission rather than parked for financial return. Jeff Skoll made the money as eBay's first president.

A double-edged sword

Even Bridgespan hedges here. Its final section warns that the same autonomy that lets families move fast can also let them avoid ever being tested. “Discretion can lead to a family following its convictions,” the authors write, “without fully testing what a problem requires.” 

Laurence Lien, chairman of the Lien Foundation and grandson of its founder, makes a related point about families that try to use philanthropy to hold themselves together rather than express a bond that already exists: “You can't use philanthropy as the glue when the pieces are already splintered. You can use it to reinforce bonds that already exist.”

The Asia numbers cut sharper than the American or European ones. 

A companion Bridgespan report, titled How the World's Wealthiest Families Give, tracked the 10 wealthiest individuals and families in each of 20 economies across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, using the 2025 Forbes Billionaires List. 

After excluding families that turned up in more than one country's ranking, the final sample was 186. Of these 115 in Asia, 71 in the rest of the world. Bridgespan is upfront about what that is and isn't. A portrait of how philanthropy looks at the very top of private wealth, not a representative survey of family philanthropy generally.

You can't use philanthropy as the glue when the pieces are already splintered. You can use it to reinforce bonds that already exist.

Who calls the shots

Start with control. 

About 95% of Asian families still control the businesses that made their money, against 68 percent outside Asia, according to the companion report. The money is newer, too. 94% of the Asian families sampled hold first- or second-generation wealth, compared with 85 percent in wealthy economies elsewhere. 

That combination of newer money and tighter control shapes how families give. It stays dependent on the business that made it instead of drifting into an arm's-length foundation. By coincidence the same number describes the giving itself. Ninety-five percent of wealthy families in Asia's middle-income economies give through business-linked structures. In the region's wealthier economies, that drops to 80%.

Asian families are also unusually comfortable in bed with the state. 

More than three-quarters of them partner directly with the government. Outside Asia, that figure is 58%. Gwendolyn Lim, head of Bridgespan's Southeast Asia office and a co-author of the report, told Fortune what happens when she brings that up with Western donors. “Their faces change a little bit,” she said.

Asked whether any family had a government partnership that constrained its independence, delayed a program or forced a change of direction for political reasons, Bridgespan told Pioneers Post it identified no such example among the families it interviewed. The research ran to more than 20 interviews. Not one produced a downside case.

They also report on themselves far more than counterparts abroad do, at least in public. 

More than 80% publicly report outputs, against 45% in high-income economies elsewhere. Bridgespan is careful to say that figure counts what families publish, not whether they track outcomes or pay for the measurement behind them. It can't name which families report metrics without funding the work of producing them. 

What its wider sample does show is that they report outcomes specifically. A defined result for a defined population rather than just an output, stays thin everywhere, Asia included. 

Only 28% of the 167 families worldwide with a public philanthropic vehicle spell out both. In interviews, Bridgespan's researchers kept hearing a version of the same complaint. Families want an outcomes report without paying for whatever produces one.

The headline number

One more number floated around the coverage. 

A $26tn Asia development financing gap through 2030. It isn't in Bridgespan's report at all. Fortune traced it to AVPN, the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, and the estimate itself appears to trace further back, to the Asian Development Bank's 2017 assessment of developing Asia's infrastructure investment needs between 2016 and 2030. Roads, ports, power grids, not a shortfall philanthropy was ever meant to fill. Somewhere between that spreadsheet and the magazine copy, an infrastructure bill turned into a call for family foundations to do more.

A separate estimate, reported this month by Alliance magazine, comes from the Commission on Asian Philanthropy, a group of 13 regional philanthropic organisations with no connection to the Bridgespan report. 

Their number? $109bn is the current scale of Asia's philanthropy ecosystem, with individuals supplying half of it and corporations a quarter. 

Better coordination among funders, not new money, could add another $189bn over the next decade, the commission argues, according to Alliance. Ichiro Kabasawa, executive director of the Nippon Foundation, framed the shift for Alliance this way. From “how much charitable giving is there and can we get more?” to “how can philanthropic ecosystems increase overall societal impact?”

All in the Family 

Almost every family in the report describes its giving as the most meaningful thing it does. Whether that lasts past the founder is another matter entirely. Cousins who never grew up together, heirs with different politics, the arguments that start the day someone dies. 

Asked which of the profiled families had already handed the philanthropic vehicle to a next generation, Bridgespan offered one documented case, the same foundation the story opens with. 

The Lien Foundation has passed into third-generation governance, and around that period it professionalized its operations and moved toward a more experimental approach, aimed at emerging and underserved needs. 

Ayoob Rawat, founding president of the Private Wealth & Family Office Association in Switzerland, said the hard part aloud. 

“As you go from one generation to the next, these family members are now cousins, no longer brothers and sisters,” he said. “They live in different parts of the world, married into different families,” he added. “And they have a hard time agreeing on much beyond just keeping the family together.”