A Donation to His University in 1964 the Year After Graduating -- $5. Total Donations by 2013 -- $1.1 Billion. (January 28, 2013)

His day job earns him US$1 per annum. His personal wealth is currently estimated to be US$25 billion, which he pledges to give away before he dies (current age 70).

This past Sunday, Michael Bloomberg, now in his third term as mayor of New York City, donated US$350 million to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he received his BS (1964) followed by an MBA from Harvard. Only recently was the total of his donations to Johns Hopkins over the past 40 years been disclosed to be US$1.1 billion, which places him in top spot for donations to universities by a living individual.

The New York Times reports: In an interview here [Baltimore], Mr. Bloomberg said he was making his donations public to encourage greater charitable giving toward education. He lamented, “In our society, we are defunding education.”

He went on to to say that when he arrived at Johns Hopkins to begin his freshman year: “I just thought I’d died and gone to heaven. If I had been the son of academics, maybe I would have been on campuses and would never have been as impressed as I was when I was here, because it’s the first time I really was walking among people who were world leaders, who were creating, inventing.”

As the NYT's Michael Barbaro puts it: "Johns Hopkins as it exists today is inconceivable without Mr. Bloomberg, whose giving has fuelled major improvements in the university’s reputation and rankings, its competitiveness for faculty and students, and the appearance of its campus."

His money has financed a physics building, a school of public health, a children’s hospital, a stem-cell research institute, a malaria institute and a library wing and has financed 20% of all needs-based financial aid grants to undergraduates over the past few years.

As Ronald Daniels, the university’s president, puts it: “When you look at these great investments that have transformed American higher education, it’s Rockefeller, it’s Carnegie, it’s Mellon, it’s Stanford and it’s Bloomberg.”

While Mr Bloomberg's philanthropy was not made public until recently, he has not be a silent donor when it comes to furthering policy; the university's deans routinely travel to New York to spruik new programs and research.

Of the mayor's latest donation of US$350 million, about US$250 million will be used to hire 50 new faculty members who will hold appointments in two departments as they pursue research in areas like the global water supply and the future of American cities. (The remaining $100 million will be devoted to financial aid.).