A Billion-Dollar Endowment on Three Legs: How the Broad...

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is the other Cambridge biomedical giant in this series, a few miles and a completely different funding model away from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Where HHMI stands on a single perpetual endowment, the Broad stands on three legs: federal research grants, private philanthropy, and its own endowment income. Its most recent Form 990, for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2024, shows what that balance looks like from the inside, and it shows something else worth noticing, a board of directors that reads like a roster of the people who move the markets the institute's own money is invested in. Everything below is from the filing and the public record.

A ten-year experiment made permanent

The Broad began in 2004 as a bet. Eli and Edythe Broad, the Los Angeles philanthropists, put up a founding gift of $100 million to create a genomics institute jointly held by MIT, Harvard, and the Harvard teaching hospitals, built on the foundation of the Whitehead Institute's genome center, with Eric Lander as founding director (Wikipedia, "Broad Institute"). It was framed as a ten-year experiment, and the experiment worked, so the Broads kept adding to it: a doubling to $200 million in 2005, then a $400 million endowment in 2008 that was explicitly meant to make the institute permanent, at which point it incorporated as an independent nonprofit (Harvard Gazette), and another $100 million in 2013, bringing the family's total giving to roughly $700 million (Harvard Gazette). Eli Broad died in 2021 (Broad Institute). The endowment he insisted on is the reason his institute does not depend on him being alive.

What the Broad does with that money is some of the most consequential biology in the world. Its scientific lineage runs through the Human Genome Project, and its core member Feng Zhang demonstrated CRISPR gene editing in human cells, work at the center of a long patent dispute with the University of California that is still unresolved after a 2025 federal appeals court sent it back for reconsideration (Science). It runs the Cancer Dependency Map, and its Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research was built on a $650 million commitment from Ted Stanley, the largest gift ever for psychiatric research (Broad Institute).

How the money moves, on three legs

Revenue for the year was $831,109,480, and the way it breaks down is the whole story. Contributions and grants were $697,728,697, and inside that number are two different things: about $227 million in government grants, mostly from the National Institutes of Health, and the rest in philanthropy. Investment income was $54,941,889, the endowment doing its work. Program service revenue was $52,829,263. Those are the three legs, federal money, donated money, and invested money, and no single one holds up the whole institute. The Broad also passed $98,689,042 straight through to collaborators as grants, because a genomics institute is a hub as much as a lab.

Expenses were $752,531,863, with $324,313,636 in salaries and benefits, and the surplus was $78,577,617. The institute director, Todd Golub, who took the role in 2021 after building the Broad's cancer program, earned $890,581 plus benefits. A few lines down sits Eric Lander, the founding director, listed as a core institute member at $621,897, back running a lab after his own detour: he left in 2021 to become President Biden's science advisor and resigned that post in February 2022 after a workplace-conduct investigation, returning to the Broad in 2023 not as director but as a scientist (STAT). The largest outside vendors are dominated by construction, led by one firm at $30,629,722 with two more above $14 million each, alongside a business-consulting firm at $9.2 million, because the Broad has been building out its Cambridge campus, and the depreciation schedule shows the result. The institute reported that 978 of its people were paid more than $100,000 in the year.

How it invests, with a board that would know

The Broad holds $366,798,597 in publicly traded securities and $1,149,494,154 in other securities, about $1.5 billion in all, and the schedule labels the large piece simply as alternative investments. So roughly three of every four invested dollars sit in private equity, hedge funds, and similar vehicles rather than in public stocks, the same alternatives-heavy posture the big university endowments run. The endowment is overwhelmingly permanent: the filing reports it is about 84 percent permanent endowment and 16 percent term, meaning donors locked most of it up for good, exactly as Eli Broad intended. Of the institute's $2.2 billion in net assets, $1,495,869,913 carries donor restrictions and only $708,232,268 does not.

Here is the detail that makes the Broad unlike anything else in this series. Its board of directors, who serve unpaid, includes some of the most consequential investors and executives alive: Seth Klarman, the value-investing legend who runs the Baupost Group, Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, Arthur Levinson of Apple and Genentech, and the Nobel laureate David Baltimore, alongside the presidents of Harvard and MIT. When an institute whose $1.5 billion competes in the same private-equity and public markets everyone else relies on seats Seth Klarman on its board, the line between the institution and the market it invests in gets very thin. This is a place that both does the science and, through the people governing it, helps set the price of the assets funding the science. Its endowment draws from the identical well as a state pension and a retiree's index fund, and a few of the people who dug some of the deepest buckets are in the boardroom.

What it owes, and what wears out

The Broad's liabilities total $740,962,746. The pieces include $221,443,350 in tax-exempt bonds, the cheap borrowing big nonprofits use to build, $162,610,232 in payables, and $115,627,303 in deferred revenue, grant money received for work not yet done. On the physical side, the institute holds $981,389,692 of land, buildings, and equipment at cost against $381,123,562 of accumulated depreciation, leaving $600,266,130 net, a young campus by the standard of this series, less than 40 percent depreciated, which is exactly what you would expect of an institution still pouring $30 million a year into construction.

For how long

Permanently, by design, but with one leg more exposed than the other two. The 2008 endowment was structured to make the Broad outlast its founders, and it has. But a tripod is only as stable as its legs, and the federal leg wobbled in 2025: a proposed cap on NIH indirect-cost reimbursement would cost the Broad roughly $50 million, prompting planned cost reductions (The Tech). That is the trade-off the Broad made against a pure endowment model like HHMI's. By taking federal grants, philanthropy, and endowment income together, it can do far more science than its endowment alone could fund, roughly $750 million a year of it. But it also imports the political risk of the federal budget in a way an institution living purely off its portfolio does not. HHMI can lose a bad year in the markets and keep paying its scientists from principal. The Broad can lose a bad year in the markets, or a bad year in Congress, and it has to manage both. Three legs carry more weight than one. They also give you more ways to stumble, and the discipline of the Broad's model is knowing that no single leg was ever meant to hold the whole thing up.

Fact-check notes and sources

All financial figures (total revenue $831,109,480; contributions and grants $697,728,697, including about $227,442,024 in government grants; investment income $54,941,889; program service revenue $52,829,263; grants paid $98,689,042; total expenses $752,531,863; salaries and benefits $324,313,636; investments in publicly traded securities $366,798,597 and other securities $1,149,494,154; the endowment split of about 84 percent permanent and 16 percent term; net assets with donor restrictions $1,495,869,913 and without $708,232,268; total liabilities $740,962,746; tax-exempt bonds $221,443,350; deferred revenue $115,627,303; land, buildings, and equipment $981,389,692 at cost less $381,123,562 accumulated depreciation; net assets $2,204,102,181; the largest construction vendor at $30,629,722; and the compensation for Todd Golub and Eric Lander): read directly from the Broad Institute's IRS Form 990 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024 (EIN 26-3428781), available free at ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. The board members named are listed on the same return's Part VII. The construction and business-consulting vendors and the count of 978 individuals paid more than $100,000 are from Part VII, Sections A and B.
The 2004 founding, the Broad family's gifts totaling roughly $700 million, and Eric Lander as founding director: Wikipedia, "Broad Institute", the 2008 Harvard Gazette account of the $400 million endowment, and the 2013 Harvard Gazette account of the $100 million second-decade gift. Eli Broad's 2021 death per the Broad Institute.
Feng Zhang's CRISPR work and the unresolved patent dispute with the University of California: Science. The Stanley Center's $650 million founding commitment: the Broad Institute.
Todd Golub as director since 2021 and Eric Lander's tenure, White House service, 2022 resignation, and 2023 return: STAT.
The proposed NIH indirect-cost cap and its roughly $50 million impact on the Broad: The Tech.

This post is informational and historical, not financial or investment advice. All figures are reproduced from the cited public filing and the public record. Individuals are discussed from the public record as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by the Broad Institute.

A Billion-Dollar Endowment on Three Legs: How the Broad Institute Pays for Itself