Michael Moritz Donates £75m To Oxford - But Who Is He?

But Who Is He?

With the news that Oxford University has received an enormous eight-figure donation to pioneer scholarships for poorer students, the inevitable question is, where did the money come from?

In this case, the philanthropic donation came from venture capitalist and former journalist Michael Moritz and his author wife, Harriet Heyman.

At a London press conference on Wednesday, Moritz said that he owed his life to the kindness of strangers, and hoped to pass that generosity on. His father, who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, also studied at Oxford, earning a PhD funded purely by scholarships.

Moritz's beloved Christ Church college, which he and his wife previously donated £25m to

Mr Moritz worked at Time magazine and wrote a number of books before entering the world of investment and now is believed to be worth over £500m through investments in companies such as Google, YouTube, PayPal and Yahoo!.

Moritz worked as a partner at Sequoia Capital before he resigned his post earlier this year, following a tragic diagnosis of an undiagnosed incurable illness.

"Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who can live a full life and defy the statisticians. But there is no way of predicting this with certainty and thus for me, life has assumed a different meaning and I am making some adjustments," he said in May.

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