Mark Zuckerberg’s choice to chop off funding to the professional‑immigration group FWD.us marks a pointy flip away from the high-profile social advocacy that after outlined his philanthropy, at the same time as MacKenzie Scott is rising because the period’s most aggressive backer of equity- and DEI-driven causes.
The break up exhibits a broader divergence in tech philanthropy: one billionaire channeling assets into science and AI infrastructure, the opposite pouring unrestricted billions into establishments serving communities traditionally excluded from energy and wealth
For greater than a decade, FWD.us was a marquee instance of Zuckerberg’s try and fuse Silicon Valley muscle with Washington coverage, pushing immigration and felony justice reform from the political heart.
However in 2025, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) quietly stopped funding FWD.us—its first 12 months with out help from Zuckerberg, his spouse Priscilla Chan, or their philanthropy—formally ending a relationship that started with a 2013 launch op‑ed and lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in backing, Enterprise Insider studies.
The wind‑down was years within the making: by late 2022, CZI had already begun pivoting away from social advocacy, offering “foundational” funding meant to present FWD.us runway earlier than the partnership ended, and in April 2025, the break was formalized. The timing now reads much less like a gradual fade than a strategic alignment with Zuckerberg’s rightward political recalibration within the Trump period, as Meta relaxed content material guidelines criticized by conservatives, whereas the corporate and its CEO leaned into the brand new administration.
Zuckerberg bets on science and AI
CZI’s new pitch sounds much less like a standard basis and extra like a analysis lab: its management talks about GPUs, not gala dinners. In November, Zuckerberg and Chan introduced that CZI would focus on science and AI, doubling down on the Biohub community of biology labs it has funded since 2016 and recruiting researchers with the promise of large compute energy slightly than extra workplace house.
The place early CZI grants had been scattered throughout immigration, felony justice, and schooling coverage, the present technique funnels capital into constructing infrastructure—information, instruments, and fashions—that scientists can use for many years. The wager is that by underwriting AI‑enabled biomedical discovery and associated fields, CZI can declare lengthy‑horizon, system‑degree influence with out the political volatility that accompanies scorching‑button social debates like border coverage or policing.
MacKenzie Scott’s DEI dedication
MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is shifting in the other way, embracing the very fairness agendas many firms and campuses are backing away from below political stress. In 2025 alone, she introduced roughly $7.1 billion in donations—bringing her complete giving since 2019 to greater than $26 billion—with a heavy tilt towards traditionally Black faculties and universities, tribal faculties, Native scholarship suppliers, and organizations serving low‑earnings and underrepresented college students.
Her current presents embody $70 million to the United Negro Faculty Fund to construct pooled endowments for 37 HBCUs and tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to Native Ahead, the most important scholarship supplier for Native college students, together with a report $42 million to 10,000 Levels, a Bay Space nonprofit centered on first‑gen and predominantly non‑white college students.
Scott’s mannequin is explicitly belief‑primarily based: giant, unrestricted checks, minimal public involvement in governance, and repeat funding for fairness‑centered organizations that may exhibit influence in closing alternative gaps.
Two fashions for tech wealth
Zuckerberg and Scott now signify two poles of philanthropy: technocratic infrastructure versus redistributive fairness. CZI is constructing a capital‑intensive platform for science and AI, betting that breakthroughs in biology and computation will in the end profit society at scale, even when the pathway is oblique and the beneficiaries diffuse.
Scott, against this, has grow to be probably the most seen counterweights to the backlash towards DEI, utilizing outsized checks to stabilize and empower establishments led by and serving communities of shade, low‑earnings college students, and different marginalized teams.
If CZI’s exit from immigration reform indicators that politically uncovered advocacy is now a legal responsibility for at the least one Silicon Valley titan, Scott’s acceleration suggests there’s nonetheless room—and urge for food—for philanthropy that takes sides within the battle over who will get entry to energy, capital, and schooling.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a analysis device. An editor verified the accuracy of the knowledge earlier than publishing.
