Madonna: Made Over $100 Mil, Gave Only $500K to Charity

Madonna is becoming something of a skinflint. She’s certainly not into using her enormous wealth to help those less fortunate.

After all that talk of her donating millions to Malawi, here’s the way it boils down thanks to a newly obtained tax filing for her Ray of Light Foundation.

According to Ray of Light’s 2008 Form 990, Ray of Light is now worth over $6 million in assets.

But Madonna gave away a total of $459,000 last year. Forbes, on the other hand, placed her annual take at $110 million and put her at number 3 on its celebrity earners list. Her last tour grossed $280 million.

Ray of Light has cut down to just a handful of charities, too. Madonna gave most of that money to Kabbalah or its associated causes. She sent $231,000 to Raising Malawi, which is a front for the Kabbalah Center; $150,000 to Kabbalah’s Spirituality for Kids; and $53,00o to the Gucci Foundation, which in turn was for Raising Malawi.

Her other two charitable contributions were to Jewish Big Brothers/Sisters of Los Angeles ($10,000) and $15,000 to the T. J. Martell Foundation for Cancer Research. Ray of Light actually paid more than that in “investment fees” ($37,000). That’s pretty sad.

What this also means is that in the year, 2008, that Madonna was special guest at AmFar’s Cinema Against AIDS in Cannes, the singer donated no money from Ray of Light to that charity or to any other conducting AIDS research.

She doesn’t even give money to MusiCares or the Grammy Foundation. I guess we can scratch her name as a contender for MusiCares’s Person of the Year.

Madonna fares very poorly by comparison with buddies like Rosie O’Donnell and Barbra Streisand, or even Oprah Winfrey. All of them are professional charity donors of the highest rank. And she’s way behind Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Paul Simon, Steven Spielberg, Sting and Trudie Styler’s Rainforest Foundation, and other charitable minded celebs.