philanthropist

plural philanthropists

1. A person who loves humankind in general.

   Antonyms: misanthropist

2. A person or institution who seeks to improve the world, especially by monetary gifts.

   He was a noted philanthropist, and played a public-spirited part in the support of the Army during the Crimean War.

   1960 March 28, N. Caplan, “The Railway Member of Parliament”, in Railway Magazine, page 209

   3 more examples

   […]and with a passing vague wonder as to what manner of man the ‘philanthropist’ might be who had more money than he knew what to do with,[…]

   1895, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan: or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, published 1896, →OCLC, page 15

   Sir Allen Stanford - the Texan billionaire who landed his Trojan helicopter at Lord's cricket ground and emerged with crates of cash - has turned out not to be the exquisitely cultured philanthropist his every action hitherto had indicated. […] Of Stanford himself, an Antiguan neighbour once remarked to this newspaper: "He is either one of the world's greatest philanthropists or one of its biggest crooks."

   2009 February 21, Marina Hyde, “Thanks for the philanthropy, billionaires. Now pay your tax”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 01 Aug 2023

   It is not uncommon for young philanthropists to retool their giving as they learn from their mistakes. Many other charities have only a single focus. But it has been jarring to allies of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to see such a wholesale discarding and downplaying of its prior work, especially given how public it had been about its goals.

   2025 June 28, Theodore Schleifer, Eli Tan, Mike Isaac, “Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Narrow CZI’s Focus to Science Efforts”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 30 Jun 2025