Simone Biles to donate $4 million to Harris-Walz campaign?

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American gymnast Simone Biles plans to announce a $4 million donation to 2024 presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

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On August 7, 2024, in the final days of the 2024 Paris Olympics, a post appeared on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that Team USA’s Simone Biles, often considered the most talented gymnast in the world, was about to announce a $4 million donation to the U.S. presidential campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The post went viral, gaining over 87,000 likes in the time it took users to share the alleged message on Facebook.

Many readers asked Snopes to verify this claim.

Although the original X post cited a “source at Sports Illustrated” as its source, Snopes found no evidence to suggest Biles planned to make a donation to Harris’ campaign at all, much less a $4 million donation.

What’s more, the post only stated that Biles intended to “formally announce” his donation, not that Already donated. Because this language merely suggests that Biles will donate money to Harris’ campaign but hasn’t yet, it’s impossible to clearly label this claim as true or false. As such, we’ve rated this claim as “Unsubstantiated.”

It’s also important to note that making a $4 million donation directly to any political campaign would be illegal under federal law. According to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) website, individuals can donate up to $3,300 to an individual candidate in any election. Higher donation limits apply if the donation is made to a Political Action Committee (PAC) or political party, and only Super PACs, which are prohibited from donating directly to political campaigns themselves, can accept an unlimited amount of money.

Federal law also states that every political campaign donation must be tracked and recorded with the FEC. Although the exact wording of the claim suggested that Biles had not yet made a donation, we still searched the FEC’s campaign finance database for due diligence donations by “Simone Biles.” We found no results from 2023 or 2024, meaning that Biles has not made any political donations since the beginning of 2023.

Further undermining this claim is the fact that Biles actually has money. Several articles have claimed that Biles is worth $25 million, citing that number on the website CelebrityNetWorth.com. While Snopes could not independently confirm that number, Biles earned an estimated $10 million in 2022 and $7.1 million in 2023, according to Forbes. As such, we figured $25 million would be a reasonable estimate of Biles’ net worth.

However, a quick calculation of that number shows that the $4 million donation was about 16% of her total net worth. While it’s not impossible (again, that’s why we rated this claim “Unsubstantiated”), we found it highly unlikely that Biles would donate 16% of her net worth in one go.

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