With the Trump administration slashing higher education funding, schools are increasingly looking to philanthropic dollars to fill the gap—but it may not be enough.

Investor Kenneth Hao and his wife recently gave $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco, and he says major donations can help universities accelerate progress on infrastructure, AI and new partnerships. But even big donations won’t fix deeper financial problems, he explains.

Academic institutions require considerable resources to sustain themselves, and large gifts are rarely predictable or recurring, says Amir Pasic of Indiana University. “You cannot expect philanthropists to replace government funding.”

This is a published version of the Forbes Daily newsletter, you can sign-up to get Forbes Daily in your inbox here.

Momentum for silver and gold prices stalled Friday as inflationary fears sent the precious metals into a slump.

Defense tech firm Anduril’s CEO and cofounder Brian Schimpf is now a billionaire thanks to the company’s latest fundraise that doubled its valuation in under a year—for the second time in a row.

xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin is in talks to raise up to $1 billion for a new AI research startup called River AI, the latest in a wave of fundraising for “neolabs.” These are startups founded by notable AI researchers that have no product or revenue, but have raised massive sums for cutting-edge, long term artificial intelligence research.

President Donald Trump is facing scrutiny for making millions of dollars worth of stock trades in recent months in companies like Nvidia, Palantir, Meta and Paramount Skydance, many of which his administration had dealings with. Trump’s financial disclosure shows he made........

© Forbes