 This was after Soros had lost almost $1 billion in the weeks after the election of Republican Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016.Soros has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa, and began funding dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain.Soros's philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-Soviet states.