Sources: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/donor-pulls-100-mill... https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4348656-upenn-loses-1... https://www.timesnownews.com/world/who-is-ross-stevens-stone... (many more)

So his goal is to prevent money issues from being a thing getting in the way of athletes achieving. But he has structured it in a way that prevents the money from helping this goal.

> Per the Wall Street Journal, “Half will come 20 years after their first qualifying Olympic appearance or at age 45, whichever comes later. Another $100,000 will be in the form of a guaranteed benefit for their families after they pass away.”

So half of it will never be seen by the athlete. Ever. And the other half will not be seen for at least two decades.

What Olympic athlete is not able to achieve as much because they don't have money decades down the road? Or because their heirs don't have enough money? I might be missing something, but how do these two incredibly-delayed payments help them train now? They can't use money they won't see for 20 or 30 years to hire coaches, buy equipment or pay for track time. They can't buy food or pay rent with money they will never see.

I wonder if this will adjust for inflation / earn interest at all. If a 20 year old olympian dies 70 years later, then when their family gets $100,000 USD nominal, it will be the equivalent of getting $8,400 in today's money. Assuming the same average inflation from the last 70 years (1956->2026).

The terms are atrocious. imo dude will move money into a his own charity which will hold onto it since no athlete qualify for the next 20 years. After a few years, he will quietly cancel the grant and use it elsewhere.

Granted, that's 20 to 60 years down the line...

Oh this explains it:

> Starting with the Olympic and Paralympic Games Milan-Cortina 2026, and going at least through the 2032 Games, every U.S. Olympian and Paralympian will receive $200,000 in financial benefits for each Games in which they compete:

Here's the setup: you have a billion dollars invested in some account earning some interest, let's say 5% because that's like bond rates (lower than S&P500). Day 1 you generate interest and don't hire. All following weekdays you hire a new employee and day then daily at a yearly rate of Y, say $250k/yr. Most people are going to be surprised that you can basically go an entire year before your account has less than a billion dollars.

I do this because it's so much money the daily interest is not negligible. I mean 1000000000*0.05/365~=$137k. Is back of the envelope and estimating, but it gets the point across. (So you can hire people daily at $100k indefinitely...)

Anyways, googling suggests there's ~600 American Olympians that participated in 2024 and another ~250 paraolympians. So what, we need on the order of $10bn to solve this? I can think of a lot worse ways we currently spend that kind of money and about 15 Americans where this would be less than 10% their total wealth and 11 of those people made more than twice that just last year... I'm not saying anyone should but hey, Elon could solve issues like these without blinking an eye. Probably better PR than anything else he could do

> His entire donation to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC), announced last March, is $100 million—a record breaking gift to the organization.

Just...lol.