Billionaire philanthropy’s growing divide: Mark Zuckerberg stops funding immigration reform as MacKenzie Scott doubles down on DEI
Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to cut off funding to the pro‑immigration group FWD.us marks a sharp turn away from the high-profile social advocacy that once defined his philanthropy, even as MacKenzie Scott is emerging as the era’s most aggressive backer of equity- and DEI-driven causes.
The split shows a broader divergence in tech philanthropy: one billionaire channeling resources into science and AI infrastructure, the other pouring unrestricted billions into institutions serving communities historically excluded from power and wealth.
For more than a decade, FWD.us was a marquee example of Zuckerberg’s attempt to fuse Silicon Valley muscle with Washington policy, pushing immigration and criminal justice reform from the political center.
But in 2025, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) quietly stopped funding FWD.us—its first year without support from Zuckerberg; his wife, Priscilla Chan; or their philanthropy—formally ending a relationship that began with a 2013 launch op‑ed and hundreds of millions of dollars in backing, Business Insider reports.
The wind‑down was years in the making: By late 2022, CZI had already begun pivoting away from social advocacy, providing “foundational” funding meant to give FWD.us runway before the partnership ended, and in April 2025, the break was formalized. The timing now reads less like a slow fade than a strategic alignment with Zuckerberg’s rightward political recalibration in the Trump era, as Meta relaxed content rules criticized by conservatives, while the company and its CEO leaned into the new administration.
CZI’s new pitch sounds less like a traditional foundation and more like a research lab: Its leadership talks about GPUs, not gala dinners. In November, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that CZI would concentrate on science and AI, doubling down on the Biohub network of biology labs it has funded since 2016 and recruiting researchers with the promise of massive compute power rather than more office space.
Where early CZI grants were scattered across immigration, criminal justice, and education policy, the current strategy funnels capital into building infrastructure—data, tools, and models—that scientists can use for decades. The bet is that by underwriting AI‑enabled biomedical discovery and related fields, CZI can claim long‑horizon, system‑level impact without the political volatility that accompanies hot‑button social debates like border policy or policing.
MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is moving in the opposite direction, embracing the very equity agendas many corporations and campuses are backing away from under political pressure. In 2025 alone, she announced roughly $7.1 billion in donations—bringing her total giving since 2019 to more than $26 billion—with a heavy tilt toward historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, Native scholarship providers, and organizations serving low‑income and underrepresented students.
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