Billionaire Charles Koch, for instance, sits 16th on the latest Forbes 400 list. The 27 donor organizations that Koch and his fellow Koch Industries execs control, the Center for Media and Democracy detailed this past spring, spent a combined $657 million on contributions to nonprofits in 2021, on top of $525 million in 2019 and $639 million in 2020.
Only 6 percent of those expenditures went to nonprofits that the Center assesses as “selfless and altruistic rather than overtly supportive of Charles Koch’s own political or financial goals.” Over 93 percent of the Koch empire’s donations went to nonprofits “primarily focused on influencing American policy and politics” into directions that do align with those goals.