Azzu , 8 months ago

They donate to their foundations. Their foundations are only required to use ~5% of their assets for actual charity.

Private foundations are required to spend annually a certain amount of money or property for charitable purposes, including grants to other charitable organizations. The amount that must be distributed annually is ascertained by computing the foundation’s distributable amount. The distributable amount is equal to the foundation’s minimum investment return with certain adjustments.

…

The minimum investment return for any private foundation is 5 percent of the excess of the combined fair market value of all assets of the foundation

These are actual IRS links.

So these foundations are free to invest 95% of the money into whatever they want and only 5% into charity. And this data is partially open, they invest into oil, pharma, finance etc.

What is not open but very likely happening, is private talks behind the scenes about what these 95% should be invested in based on personal motivations/goals of these billionaires, i.e. just doing with their money what they want anyway, just in a tax-free way.