The largest 25 hedge-fund foundations — which now control about $4.6-billion — grew 31 percent last year and gave away $459-million, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The foundations, which gave grants worth 61 percent more money in 2007, donated the most funds to nonprofit groups for children, education, and health care.

George Soros’s Open Society Institute is the largest hedge-fund foundation, with $1.3-billion. The firms that control the next four largest foundations were Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management, Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies, Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital, and T. Boone Pickens’s BP Capital Management, the newspaper reports.

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