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Phil Knight and his wife Penny are donating $1 billion to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Oregon, one of the largest gifts ever made to an American healthcare institution.
The money will build the first women's specialty hospital in the state, with a neonatal intensive care unit and integrated gynaecology, maternity, menopause and cardiovascular services under one roof. It will also expand cardiovascular care across several Providence facilities through the Providence Heart Institute.
The Knights announced it on Sept. 15.
They have given to the same institute before. A previous $200 million gift funded its cardiovascular programmes, including a heart transplant service that Providence built out afterwards.
This is their second billion-dollar donation in thirteen months. They gave $2 billion to Oregon Health & Science University in August 2025 for cancer research, the largest single gift ever made to an American university or academic health centre, having already put $500 million into the same institution in 2013 and issued a $1 billion challenge grant that it matched.
Both gifts stay inside Oregon, where Knight co-founded Nike in 1964 and where the company is still headquartered at Beaverton.
The company is not in good shape. Nike closed at $36.30, and its price-to-earnings ratio of 17.37 sits well below a five-year median of 30.56, a gap that usually signals investors have stopped believing in the growth story rather than that the stock is cheap. Its market value is around $53.86 billion.
Insiders have been selling. Company executives disposed of a net $771,333 of stock over the past three months, against institutional investors who have been split, with eight adding to positions and six trimming.
The dividend is the one thing holding up. Nike yields 4.52%, which is high for a consumer company and reflects how far the share price has fallen rather than how much the payout has risen.
None of that appears to have changed what the Knights intend to do with the money. Forbes and Bloomberg both value his fortune above $30 billion, built on a shareholding he has been giving away steadily for a decade, and the $3 billion committed to Oregon institutions in the past year alone exceeds what most American universities hold in their entire endowments.
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