Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to cut funding to the pro-immigration group FWD.us marks a sharp turn from the high-profile social advocacy that once defined his philanthropy, though Mackenzie Scott is emerging as one of the era’s most aggressive advocates of equity- and SSDE.
The split reflects a widening divide in tech philanthropy: one billionaire channeling resources into science and AI infrastructure, the other pouring unlimited billions into organizations that serve communities historically excluded from power and wealth.
For more than a decade, FWD.us was a classic example of Zuckerberg’s efforts 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—the first year without Zuckerberg’s support; his wife, Priscilla Chan; Or their philanthropy—formally ended a relationship that began in 2013 with hundreds of millions of dollars in support and endorsements, Business Insider reports.
The wind-down was years in the making: by late 2022, CZI had already begun to distance itself from social advocacy, providing “core” funding for FWD.us’ runway days 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 political recalibration to the right in the Trump era, as Meta relaxed content regulations criticized by conservatives, while the company and its CEO bowed to the new administration.
CZI’s new pitch looks 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 focus on science and AI, doubling down on the Biohub network of biology labs funded from 2016 and recruiting researchers with the promise of greater compute power than more office space.
Whereas 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 research and related fields, CZI can claim long-horizon, system-level impact without the political instability 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 more equity agendas while many corporations and campuses are bucking political pressure. In 2025 alone, she announced nearly $7.1 billion in donations—bringing her total giving from 2019 to more than $26 billion—with a heavy tilt toward historically black colleges and universities, indigenous colleges, Native scholarship providers, and organizations serving low-income and underrepresented students.
