Billionaire Couple Falls Off Forbes List of Richest People After Giving Away Nearly Half of Their Fortune to Date

A billionaire couple known for aggressive philanthropy has slipped off Forbes’ annual list of the 400 richest Americans after donating a significant share of their wealth.

In 2023, John Arnold ranked No. 345 on the Forbes 400. Two years later, in 2025, the 51-year-old philanthropist landed at No. 1,265 on Forbes’ broader list of U.S. billionaires—well below the cutoff for the top 400.

That drop wasn’t sudden so much as inevitable. For more than a decade, John and Laura Arnold have focused on giving away their fortune at a fast clip. According to the outlet, they’ve donated $2 billion so far and are listed among the top 25 most generous donors in the U.S. Their remaining fortune is currently estimated at about $2.9 billion.

Altogether, the Arnolds have given away an estimated 42% of what they once had—and they don’t appear to be easing up.

John’s wealth traces back to his early career. He previously worked at Enron and earned $750 million for the company in 2001, the year it collapsed, according to Forbes. The following year, he founded the hedge fund Centaurus Advisors, according to Bloomberg. A decade later, he announced he would stop managing other people’s money, per Forbes.

Laura’s professional path began in law. She previously worked as a mergers and acquisitions attorney at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz in New York City, according to a news release from Rice University following her election as a trustee in April 2010. She later served as executive vice president and general counsel of Cobalt International Energy in Houston before leaving the company in 2006.

In 2008, the couple launched the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which has since evolved into Arnold Ventures. The organization focuses on criminal justice reform, higher education, health, infrastructure, and public finance, according to its website.

“They believe philanthropy should be transformational and should seek through innovation to solve persistent problems in society,” reads a message on the organization’s website.

In 2010, both John and Laura signed The Giving Pledge, launched that same year by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.

In a letter announcing their commitment to giving away most of their fortune, the couple wrote that they both “view our wealth…not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to effect positive and transformative change.”

In July 2019, John and Laura joined the board of the REFORM Alliance, according to Business Insider. The non-profit organization, founded by rappers Meek Mill and Jay-Z, “aims to transform probation and parole by changing laws, systems, and culture to create real pathways to work and wellbeing,” according to its website.

At the time, Laura told the outlet that philanthropy “has always been a core value” in her family, and that their giving is aimed at tackling “very difficult, intractable issues that impact a large number of people.”

“It is important to us to leave behind a better country than we were born into,” Laura added. “Having achieved financial success early in our lives, we had the enormous privilege of making this mission our full-time job.”

In an interview with Texas Monthly in December 2018, John said he and Laura are “willing to take risks” with their giving in hopes of achieving “high impact.” Laura echoed that approach elsewhere in the story, describing their grants as deliberate bets—saying “every dollar that goes out the door is a strategic investment.”

“We understand that governments are by nature risk-averse, so we’re trying to create an infrastructure and a set of ideas that can redirect funds to be more effectively and efficiently spent,” Laura explained. “The things that we’ve done, the things that we’ve got on deck, could really be game changers.”

Representatives for Laura and John declined to provide comment for this story when contacted.