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| - On Aug. 7, 2024, in the last few days of the 2024 Paris Olympics, a post on X (formerly Twitter) alleged that Team USA's Simone Biles, often considered the most talented gymnast in the world, was going to announce a $4 million donation to the U.S. presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The post was immediately popular, gaining over 87,000 likes at the same time users shared the supposed news to Facebook.
Many readers asked Snopes to check into the claim.
Despite the original X post citing "a source at Sports Illustrated" for its information, Snopes found no evidence suggesting Biles planned to make a donation to the Harris campaign at all, especially not one for $4 million.
Furthermore, the post only claimed Biles was going to "formally announce" her donation, not that she had already donated. Since this wording only implies that Biles will, but has not yet, donated money to the Harris campaign, applying a cut-and-dry "true" or "false" label to the claim becomes impossible. As such, we have rated this claim "Unfounded."
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 are allowed to donate up to $3,300 to an individual candidate every election. Higher donation limits apply if the donation is to a Political Action Committee (PAC) or a political party, and only Super PACs, which are banned from contributing directly to political campaigns themselves, can accept an unlimited amount of money.
Federal law also dictates that every donation to a political campaign must be tracked and recorded with the FEC. Although the exact wording of the claim suggested that Biles had not yet donated, we still searched the FEC's campaign finance database for donations made by "Simone Biles" out of due diligence. We found no results from 2023 and 2024, meaning that Biles had not made any political donations since the beginning of 2023.
Further placing the claim into doubt is how much money Biles actually has. Several articles claimed that Biles was worth $25 million, citing the figure to the website CelebrityNetWorth.com. While Snopes could not independently confirm that figure, Biles earned around $10 million in 2022 and $7.1 million in 2023, according to Forbes. As such, we felt that $25 million would be a reasonable estimate of Biles' net worth.
However, quick math on that figure shows that a $4 million donation was about 16% of her total net worth. Although not impossible (again that's why we rated this claim "Unfounded,"), we found it highly improbable that Biles would donate 16% of her net worth in one swoop.
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