Bill Gates has donated a record-shattering $6 billion in stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pushing its value to $17.1 billion and making it the largest in America and probably the world, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reports.

With assets of $13 billion, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation now moves to second place.

"Combined with the growth of the Packard Foundation, this will be seen as one of two or three historic points in American philanthropy, just as the Carnegie and Rockefeller points were the beginnings of other eras," Kirk O. Hanson, a senior lecturer in business ethics at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, told the Mercury News.

The stock gift first surfaced as part of Newsweek magazine's cover story on Gates. During an interview with reporter Steven Levy, Gates casually mentioned he was boosting his foundation's assets "up a bit" past $17 billion.

Also, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been consolidated from the William H. Gates Foundation, the Gates Learning Foundation (formerly the Gates Library Foundation) and the Gates Center for Technology Access. The new foundation will continue to concentrate on world health and education, the Mercury News reports.

Under federal standards for a tax-exempt foundation, the Gates Foundation will have to give away at least 5 percent of its total assets every year. To meet this requirement under current Microsoft stock prices, the foundation will have to give away at least $850 million annually, the Mercury News reports.

The Gates foundation is expected to give a total of $500 million in grants this year, slightly ahead of the $440 million in grants expected from the Packard organization, Newsweek reports.

Both groups are being outspent by the Ford Foundation -- with projected giving of $550 million this year -- and the Lilly Endowment, which is expected to provide grants totaling more than $500 million in 1999, the news magazine reports. Ford has assets of $11.1 billion, the Lilly Endowment $11.1 billion.

Hanson, the Stanford professor, told the Mercury News that he expects this gift to lead to more charitable giving by other technology entrepreneurs who have grown rich in the "new economy."

The foundation will be headed jointly by William H. Gates Sr. and Patty Stonesifer.

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