"Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist."
Good thing this writer is unbiased.
How about if the person with 50k gave away 25k, but the billionaire gave away double that? Who is more generousness in that case?
It seems fairly plain to me that utility of what was given away is by far the most important factor in determining generosity.
For example, wasn't there just an article on HN within the past week about Norman Borlaug, whose agricultural techniques helped prevent hundreds of millions of people from starving? That doesn't seem less significant.
One can be a philanthropist without being a humanitarian by, for example, donating large amounts of money to creating wildlife refuges. Charitable giving, but not to humans.
From the other direction, people like Norman Borlaug who devote their careers to helping other people are excellent examples of people who are humanitarians without necessarily being philanthropists.
So saying Gates is the biggest philanthropist, I guess, is "objectively true" if you're being pedantic, and using philanthropist in the technical sense. My point was that it's not "objectively true" that he's the biggest benefactor of humanity, which is the more general-use term for "philanthropist."
An alternate reading could be that the statement is meant to be obviously opinion; one school of thought on writing is that it should be obvious which statements are fact and which are opinion by the very nature of the statement, and it is superfluous to preface them with phrases like "in my opinion".