WhatsApp’s reclusive founder has quietly become a megadonor to Jewish causes
Ukrainian-born Jan Koum has gone almost unnoticed
in the world of philanthropy, but tax returns reveal that the
multi-billionaire is one of his coreligionists’ largest supporters
By Asaf Shalev
The fighting in Ukraine has been called “a WhatsApp war” amid widespread reliance on messaging apps by journalists, soldiers and ordinary civilians, and their central role in spreading propaganda.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp’s inventor, a Ukrainian-born Jew whose creation
made him one of the wealthiest people in the world, has kept
conspicuously quiet throughout the conflict. Jan Koum, who controls a
multi-billion-dollar charitable foundation, has not uttered a public
word even as many other wealthy Ukrainians and Russians announce
donations toward humanitarian relief efforts.
But based on an examination of tax returns filed by Koum’s foundation
before the war, the publicity-shy WhatsApp founder, who arrived in
California as a teenager, is more entwined than meets the eye with the
events rocking the country he left behind as a 16-year-old. His
donations, only a sliver of which have been previously reported, include
tens of millions of dollars to Jewish organizations now involved in
relief efforts in Eastern Europe.
For example, from 2019 to 2020, the latest year for which there is a
tax return, the Koum Family Foundation donated about $17 million to the
European Jewish Association, an organization headquartered in Brussels
that launched a campaign in March to provide housing, food and clothing
to refugees from the war. Nearly all of the group’s 2019 budget came
from Koum.
With $10.6 million in gifts over that same period, Koum’s foundation
is also one of the most significant donors to another group involved in
relief efforts: the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. The
group, whose name refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, an
association of former Soviet territories, announced the establishment of an ambulance fleet to evacuate patients throughout Ukraine.
It is unknown whether Koum continued to make donations in 2021 and
afterward because his foundation and all of the past grantees contacted
by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency have either ignored requests for
comment or declined to speak on the record. JTA contacted more than a
dozen of the nonprofits, several of which said they were prohibited from
publicly acknowledging Koum’s giving as a condition of their gift.
Due to the secrecy marking his charitable giving, as well as his
personal life, Koum’s profile as a philanthropist over the past several
years has gone almost unnoticed. However, tax returns reveal that Koum,
with a fortune estimated between $9.8 billion and $13.7 billion, has
quietly become one of the largest donors to Jewish causes in the world.
His foundation gave nearly $140 million from 2019 to 2020 to about 70
Jewish charities working in the United States, Eastern Europe and
Israel. That’s on par with the rate of giving by the biggest and
best-known donors in the Jewish world, such as Tulsa-based Charles and
Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, whose imprint is on hundreds of
Jewish organizations, including JTA.
At this level of giving, Koum has an outsized impact on Jewish
communal life but without any of the public awareness that often
accompanies major philanthropy.
That Koum has been able to operate under the radar isn’t surprising
to Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of American Jewish history at Temple
University, who writes about philanthropy.
“We have a system in place that guards the privacy of donors and
requires minimal forms of reporting and oversight,” she said. “Only by
knowing the Koum name can I excavate tax records to see the list of
grantees — and this assumes that the foundation disburses all of its
gifts directly, without using community foundations as pass-throughs.
The rules as they exist appear to value the donor’s privacy and autonomy
above the public’s knowledge.”
Transparency about funding should be particularly important when it
comes to Jewish nonprofits because of their goal of “stitchi[ing]
together the broad diversity of Jewish life,” said Corwin Berman.
The Jewish public should care because such a large funder can inevitably sculpt and set communal priorities
“The Jewish public should care because such a large funder can inevitably sculpt and set communal priorities,” she said.
An analysis of the Koum foundation’s tax returns reflects that, more
than any other cause, Koum gives to nonprofits affiliated with
Chabad-Lubavitch, the international and growing Hasidic Orthodox Jewish
movement with origins in Eastern Europe. Chabad, which provides
religious and humanitarian services in far-flung Jewish communities,
runs an array of current activities in the region.
The European Jewish Association, for example, is led by a
Chabad-affiliated rabbi, and the Federation of Jewish Communities of the
CIS counts Berel Lazar, a major Chabad rabbi who leads Russia’s Jewish
community, as a director. Koum has also given to several Chabad
congregations in California and other organs of the movement.
One of Koum’s top Chabad-linked grantees is a nonprofit known as the
Jewish Community Center of Moscow, whose address leads to a brown-brick
residential building in Brooklyn, a few minutes’ walk away from Chabad’s
global headquarters in Crown Heights.
The organization has no website, and since it is classified as a
religious organization, the Jewish Community Center of Moscow is exempt
from filing paperwork detailing its mission, leadership or financial
activity, as is required of other types of nonprofits. But a review of IRS records
suggests that a typical donation to the organization ranged from
$15,000-$55,000 for a number of years until, in 2019, the pattern
changed. That’s when the Koum foundation gave the nonprofit $3.3
million. In 2020, it gave $5.7 million.
Rabbi Berel Lazar at his office in Moscow, February 5, 2018. (Ariel Schnabel)
No one reached by JTA would speak on the record about Koum’s
motivations, but Chabad is popular among Jews who grew up in the former
Soviet Union.
“In their outreach, mode of operations and philosophy Chabad have
been very welcoming and helpful to Russian-speaking Jews,” said Misha
Galperin, a consultant to donors and charities and the president of the
National Museum of American Jewish History, who grew up in the Soviet
Union.
Galperin said this affinity exists despite the lack of religious observance among many Jews from the former Soviet Union.
“Most Jews from the former Soviet Union are not observant, and
they’re not particularly interested in following the commandments in the
way that Chabad understands them,” he said. “But they [Chabad] look
like Jews — in other religions, you might think of priests and imams as
having a uniform. In Judaism, it’s [Chabad] Lubavitch and other Hasidim
who have a look. So many Russian-speaking Jews think of Chabad as ‘my
synagogue that I won’t go to.’”
Joshua Tapper, a historian of Soviet Jewry who has written about
Chabad’s success with this demographic, said the movement offers an
appealing message for people whose Jewish identity was suppressed by
Soviet authorities.
“Chabad’s rhetoric is that ‘our movement was born here, we survived
many decades underground, in the Soviet wilderness, getting by on our
wits and our religious fervor and belief in God, and now we’ve reclaimed
our rightful place as the leader of Russian-speaking Jewry,’” said
Tapper, who is a graduate student at Stanford University and former
reporter for JTA.
Koum’s donations are not limited to Chabad or even to religious
groups. He is also a major supporter of the Israeli healthcare system
with gifts to Hadassah and to the US fundraising affiliates of various
Israeli hospitals.
He also donates millions to Jewish institutions in the San Francisco
Bay Area, such as the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Silicon
Valley. Tax records also reveal that he is the previously anonymous donor behind a new $3.5 million center for the Russian-speaking Jewish community of San Francisco.
Lazar, a Chabad emissary, with congregants at an unfinished synagogue in Sevatopol, Crimea, July 14, 2014. (Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA)
At least a few of his donations reflect his right-wing political
views on Israel. Donations of $600,000 went to the Maccabee Task Force
Foundation, an organization founded by the late Republican megadonor
Sheldon Adelson to support Israel advocacy on college campuses. The
foundation has also given $6 million to Friends of Ir David, the
American fundraising arm of Elad, a group trying to expand Jewish settlement in parts of largely Arab East Jerusalem, and $175,000 to the Central Fund of Israel, which has been accused of supporting violent extremists in Israel.
The Koum foundation’s only major non-Jewish gifts have gone to two
universities: $1 million to Fordham in 2020 and some $41 million to
Stanford since 2017. His affinity for these institutions is somewhat
surprising considering that the only university Koum has attended is San
Jose State University, from which he dropped out to focus on his first
major job in tech, at Yahoo.
A Flourish data visualization
Koum’s story is a real-life rags-to-riches tale of an immigrant who
came to the United States with nothing, sought to improve his lot,
worked hard and became fabulously wealthy as he developed a product used
by billions of people every day. Since he has granted very few
interviews, most of what’s known about his life can be gleaned from only
a few sources, most notably a profile by Forbes penned as he and his partners sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $22 billion in 2014.
A previously unreported lawsuit filed against Koum in Los Angeles by a
former employee at one of his mega-mansions last year helps fill in the
years since the acquisition and following Koum’s departure from
Facebook in 2018. It reflects an account of Koum as a hoarder of some of
the most expensive homes in California and a zealous protector of his
own privacy.
Koum was raised on the outskirts of Kyiv in the town Fastiv, which
happened to be shelled by Russian forces early in the current war.
In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union and amid political
turmoil and antisemitic tension, a teen-aged Koum his mother immigrated
to Mountain View, California, and began living in a two-bedroom
apartment made available through public assistance. His father stayed
behind and died in 1997.
They relied on food stamps as his mom earned money babysitting and
Koum swept the floors of a grocery store for work. His mom was soon
diagnosed with cancer, entitling the family to disability payments for a
while. She died in 2000, leaving Koum an orphan at 24.
His self-education in computer networking brought him into contact
with the emerging startup world in Silicon Valley, and he eventually
went to work for Yahoo with his future WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton.
The two bonded over their shared no-nonsense attitude. “Neither of us
has an ability to bullshit,” Acton told Forbes.
The duo left Yahoo in 2007 to take a sabbatical, which was spent
traveling South America and playing Ultimate Frisbee. In a twist that
would prove ironic, they each applied to work at Facebook but were
rejected.
In 2009, the iPhone had only recently been launched, and the App
Store was only seven months old. Koum saw an opportunity in this new
mobile frontier and he began brainstorming ideas with members of the
Russian-speaking community of San Jose. Forbes describes
long conversations about WhatsApp over tea between Koum and Alex
Fishman, a graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who
played host to the community at his apartment in San Jose.
Within two years of WhatsApp’s launch, it was among the most
downloaded apps in the still-nascent world of apps, offering free,
encrypted texts, phone calls, videos and other content. The company
remained on a steep growth curve and by early 2013, WhatsApp had 200
million active users and a staff of 50.
The scrappy startup, operating out of a low-profile building without
so much as a logo in sight, caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg.
After a protracted courtship, Zuckerberg got Koum and Acton to agree to a
sale, and Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in cash and stock in
2014. On Koum’s initiative, the three signed the deal while standing
outside the building that formerly housed the welfare agency where Koum
received food stamps.
Koum stayed on with the company, joining Facebook’s board of
directors, but in 2018 he announced he was stepping down. The Washington
Post reported that Koum left over Facebook’s increasingly lax privacy practices.
The window into Koum’s thinking narrowed at this time because of his
lack of engagement with the press, but the billionaire did communicate
some of his thoughts on Facebook to roughly 90,000 people following his
posts. He was sharing links to pro-Trump and anti-immigration articles
and expressed a hardline pro-Israel stance. Eventually, he all but
stopped posting to social media.
It’s largely a mystery how Koum spends his time nowadays. For a
campaign donation made last year, the 46-year-old Koum declared his
occupation as “retired.”
He is known to own six enormous mansions in the Silicon Valley
enclave of Atherton and in Malibu, at least two of which are worth
something close to $100 million.
He established a company for the sole purpose of operating these
properties, according to a lawsuit by a former employee of the company
named Carina Walker. In 2019, she was hired at an annual salary of
$100,000 to maintain the landscaping at just one of these properties, in
Malibu. About three months later, she was fired. Walker soon sued Koum,
claiming he dismissed her because of her disability and medical
condition in violation of anti-discriminatory protections.
According to the lawsuit, Koum is averse to the sight of hired help.
“[W]henever it was determined that Koum would arrive at one of his
properties, his employees were forced to scramble off whichever property
Koum was visiting in order to avoid being seen by him,” the lawsuit
says.
The year Koum sold WhatsApp he transferred $556 million to the
Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a charity that distributes money on
behalf of donors. It’s unknown where this money may have gone. But the
following year, Koum established his own foundation, and a small view
into Koum’s affairs opened up.
He seeded the foundation with hundreds of millions of dollars in
Facebook stock, building toward an endowment that was valued at more
than $2 billion in 2020. Although tax returns detailing his giving are
not yet available past that year, the legal requirement that a
foundation dispense at least 5% of its assets each year suggests that
his charitable donations have only ramped up since.
Koum’s devotion to funding Chabad and other Jewish groups became
increasingly apparent starting in the foundation’s 2018 tax returns.
Aside from the earlier pro-Israel statements, he didn’t have much of a
public Jewish identity, so the disclosure of these donations would seem
to come out of nowhere.
But Koum’s adventures in philanthropy continue a tradition of giving
by Jews from the former Soviet Union, as well as a recent wave of
philanthropy driven by new wealth in the community.
Lena Katsnelson, the director of UJA FSU, the division of
UJA-Federation of New York focused on Jews of the former Soviet Union,
noted there’s a history of more than 30 years of charitable giving by
this community.
Galperin, meanwhile, noted that Koum isn’t the only donor in what he
characterizes as a wave of Russian-speaking Jews who have become wealthy
in tech and other sectors. He gave the examples of Russian-born Eugene
Fooksman, who joined WhatsApp early to work as a software engineer, and
founded a foundation that made some $1.1 million in donations in 2020,
and Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, who was born in Ukraine and
makes donations to various Jewish causes but not through a dedicated
foundation.
“This generation took its time to settle down, develop the means and the interests to become philanthropists,” Galperin said,
He added that among all Jews, this group has a particular history that primes many to donate to Jewish causes above all else.
“That’s because for many of them, the act of leaving the Soviet Union
and coming to whether it’s Israel or the United States or Canada, have a
lot to do with their Jewish identity,” he said.
Jacob Henry contributed reporting to this story.
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