Hundreds of millions in donations and counting: how Yuri Milner’s “scientific method of giving” turns philanthropy into a high‑impact experiment in human progress
Yuri Milner’s philanthropy, viewed in aggregate, is not a scattershot list of donations but a coherent capital‑allocation strategy aimed at one overarching goal: maximizing the long‑term return on human potential.
Across science prizes, cosmic “moonshots,” refugee relief, support for embattled research communities, and humanitarian efforts in Israel, his total giving now comfortably runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars—quite plausibly into the low billions when one includes multi‑year science commitments and large infrastructure pledges—almost all of it tightly aligned with a single thesis that knowledge and technology are the ultimate public goods.
The most visible pillar of this portfolio is his decade-plus investment in fundamental science.
The Breakthrough Prize and its sister programs deliver tens of millions of dollars in awards, production costs, and institutional grants each year, totaling well over 100 million dollars in cumulative funding since their launch.
Individual prizes of 3 million dollars in fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics have been complemented by targeted institutional gifts, such as a 1‑million‑dollar award to the CMS Collaboration at CERN, routed through the CERN & Society Foundation to endow fellowships for young physicists. Milner’s more recent participation in a 1‑billion‑dollar private‑donor pledge to support CERN’s next‑generation collider signals a willingness to move from honoring discoveries to underwriting the very infrastructure that will make future breakthroughs possible.
Layered on top of this are his space‑focused initiatives—Breakthrough Listen and Breakthrough Starshot—backed by a combined $ 100 million to accelerate the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and to explore the feasibility of interstellar probes, a sum described by observers as “historic” for the field.
Alongside these marquee science commitments, Milner has made a series of large, structured bets on humanitarian technology and crisis response. In 2022, the foundation he co‑founded with Julia Milner committed $ 100 million to launch Tech For Refugees, designed to leverage the existing infrastructure of tech companies such as Airbnb.org, Flexport.org, Spotify, Uber, and later partners such as Welcome. US, UNICEF, and the International Rescue Committee to deliver services to displaced people.
Public updates from Tech For Refugees and its partners indicate that this capital has funded free housing for refugees, large‑scale humanitarian logistics, digital learning platforms for Ukrainian children, and AI‑enabled information and education tools for families fleeing conflict, with aggregate reach measured in many millions of users.
Beyond that foundational pledge, Milner and his entities have contributed at least 14.5 million dollars in additional humanitarian aid tied to the Ukraine war, including 3 million dollars for international relief organizations, 3 million dollars to the Conference of European Rabbis to support Jewish refugees, 2 million dollars to the Mila Kunis–Ashton Kutcher “Stand With Ukraine” GoFundMe, and 3.5 million dollars from his firm DST Global to the same crowdfunding effort.
Another major component of his total giving targets the survival and mobility of scientific communities facing crisis, particularly Ukrainian researchers.
The foundations associated with Milner have committed 6 million dollars for Ukrainian science and scientists, structured as a portfolio of grants to trusted academies: a 1‑million‑dollar donation to a U.S. National Academy of Sciences program for displaced scholars, matching funds of up to 2.1 million dollars to expand that initiative, and several million more via ALLEA, the Australian Academy of Science, and a Tel Aviv University‑led consortium to secure positions, lab access, and collaboration opportunities for affected researchers.
These gifts are deliberately channeled through existing institutions, making global academies and universities temporary “shock absorbers” for a research system under stress, and ensuring that years of training and tacit knowledge are not lost to the war.
When one adds in long‑standing science‑education gifts—such as 10 million dollars to the Wharton School to endow full‑tuition MBA fellowships and other academic donations—Milner’s academic and scientific giving forms a cumulative figure that alone sits in the high hundreds of millions.
Milner’s total giving also includes significant, though more traditional‑looking, contributions to Israeli and Jewish humanitarian causes.
Well before the recent conflicts, he and Julia Milner had become notable donors to Israeli institutions, including support for Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Magen David Adom, and the Peres Center for Peace.
In 2023, following a new wave of attacks on Israel, Milner announced a further 10 million dollars in donations to Israeli humanitarian organizations, dividing 5 million dollars to the Jewish Agency’s Fund for the Victims of Terror, 2.5 million dollars to Magen David Adom, and 2.5 million dollars to Tel Aviv Sourasky to expand trauma care and intensive‑care capacity.
This sits atop earlier, less publicized support for emergency response, medical infrastructure, and coexistence programs, reinforcing the pattern of using philanthropy to stabilize key institutions in moments of acute strain.
Pulling these strands together, a conservative tally of Milner’s public commitments—100 million dollars for Breakthrough Listen and Starshot, 100 million dollars for Tech For Refugees, at least 6 million dollars for Ukrainian science, at least 14.5 million dollars in additional Ukraine‑related humanitarian aid, 10 million dollars for Israeli humanitarian relief in 2023, 10 million dollars for Wharton fellowships, multi‑million‑dollar science prizes and institutional gifts over more than a decade, and participation in a 1‑billion‑dollar collider funding pledge—places his disclosed philanthropy well north of 250–300 million dollars in direct, enumerated cash and easily into the upper hundreds of millions once recurring prize funding and longer‑term program costs are included.
Given his membership in the Giving Pledge, his public commitment to donate the majority of his several‑billion‑dollar fortune, and the scale of multi‑year initiatives already underway, it is reasonable to view this figure not as an endpoint but as an interim snapshot of a much larger trajectory.
Across every line item, the through‑line is unmistakable: Milner is deploying capital the way a physicist‑investor would—toward those leverage points where an incremental dollar today might yield, decades from now, Einstein‑level returns for humanity as a whole.