>It simply means something that took place prior to a moment in the past

True, but that implies that there exists such a moment with particular significance. Otherwise, you wouldn't use that tense. In other words, it leaves you thinking Bill Gates donated 36 billion dollars before X, where X is his death, an alien invasion, the collapse of the dollar, etc.

I don't know if there is a rule of thumb as to what tense to use, but "had donated" in this context feels plain wrong. That kind of dissonance is captured perfectly by this Mitch Hedberg quote:

>I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

Like I said, "had donated" is ambiguous, however, inferring that this must mean Bill Gates either died or gave the donated money back is more than a bit of a stretch.

Well, yes, it's a bitch of a stretch because of our context, still the phrase is ambiguous, so it's better with 'has'

The phrase certainly can be fixed if it refers to some event like 'Bill Gates had donated 36 billion before he left Microsoft'

To me it implies that the event took place prior to the end of his lifetime, which implies that his lifetime has ended.

"Has donated" carries the correct meaning and is unambiguous.

And absent of any intent on the speaker's part to contextualize vis-à-vis this prior moment in the past, it is the wrong tense.

Just to reiterate the other comments, "had" is wrong because you included "in his lifetime" to contextualise it -- this implies the period of time known as his "lifetime" is in the past, which is wrong because he is still alive, and so "had" is incorrect.

If one had said "Bill Gates had donated over $x [before he was 55]" it would be fine.

In languages English is derived from, there is also the presence of an "aspect" to a verb, which denotes when a verb ends. We carry this through in English with the difference between "had donated" "donated" and "was donating", where the action is either completed in the past, ambiguous, or could be ongoing. I don't know if this is the "proper" way to talk about it in terms of English grammar, since I'm not sure there is such a thing for such a diverse language, but it is in Ancient Greek and Latin. Your link does a good job for people who are mixing up the auxiliary verb "had" which can be a main verb, "to have" but is not in this case. The main action here relates to donating, not having.