An earlier run of this series read the Rocky Mountain foundations off their filings, the quiet family money most people never hear about. This one reads the loud money: two dozen of the largest and newest private foundations in America, the vehicles where tech and oil and insurance fortunes go to become philanthropy. Read side by side from their tax returns, they hold well over a hundred billion dollars between them, and they answer this series' four questions, how they invest, how they stay solvent, how they keep giving, and for how long, in ways that are stranger than the small foundations' answers, not simpler.
One caution up front, because it governs every number below. On a Form 990-PF, the "total revenue" line is inflated by the gross proceeds of selling securities, so a foundation that churned its portfolio can show billions in "revenue" that is not income at all. This post therefore uses the honest numbers: total assets, and grants actually paid. Everything is from the filings, free at ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.
The fortunes that became foundations overnight
The most striking thing in this batch is how fast a foundation can appear. In 2024 the Stephens Greth Foundation of Midland, Texas came into existence holding two billion dollars. Its founder, oilman Autry Stephens, built the Permian Basin producer Endeavor Energy, sold it to Diamondback Energy in a $26 billion deal that closed in September 2024, a month after he died, and roughly $2 billion of his estate flowed into a foundation run by his daughter that had granted nothing at all in its first year (Wikipedia, "Autry Stephens"; World Oil). By April 2026 it was writing $100 million checks, including one toward a children's hospital campus in Dallas (UT Southwestern). A two billion dollar grantmaker that almost nobody has heard of, eighteen months old.
It is a pattern. The Sarofim Foundation of Houston activated after investor Fayez Sarofim died in 2022, and a roughly $1.35 billion estate contribution has already grown the corpus past $3.1 billion (Inside Philanthropy). The Schoen Foundation of Naples took in a $423 million bequest in 2024 after hospital executive William J. Schoen died, turning a modest family fund into a $412 million grantmaker overnight, and promptly gave $25 million to a local Habitat for Humanity (Habitat Collier). The Carl Angus DeSantis Foundation of Delray Beach, built on the Rexall Sundown vitamin fortune and an early stake in the energy drink Celsius, jumped from $85 million to $386 million in a single year on estate and stock inflows (Forbes). The Hunter Family Foundation near Chicago went from $62 million to $420 million in two years around a founder's death, from a fortune whose source is genuinely hard to document (ProPublica). When a rich person dies, a foundation is very often where the money lands, and the ledger records the splash.
The tech founders, and money that outruns the rules
The newest of the new fortunes are made of stock, and stock that has been going nearly straight up, which creates a problem the tax code did not anticipate. A private foundation must give away roughly five percent of its assets every year. When the assets are Nvidia shares in 2024, five percent is a moving target sprinting away from you.
The clearest case is the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, the personal foundation of Nvidia's chief executive. Seeded in 2007 with 370,000 Nvidia shares then worth about $12.6 million, it grew roughly 170 percent in a single year to $9.2 billion at the end of 2024, which now makes a foundation run by two people with no staff and no website as large as the century-old MacArthur Foundation (Inside Philanthropy). Bloomberg reported that Huang logs something like one-hour weeks there, and two thirds of its $126 million payout in 2024 went not to charities but into a donor-advised fund, which satisfies the five percent rule while obscuring where the money ultimately goes (Fortune). Larry Page's Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, named for his father, does the same at larger scale: reported around $6.7 billion at fair value, it routes almost all of its giving, 99.9 percent over one recent decade, through donor-advised funds (Inside Philanthropy). Sergey Brin's family foundation, about $4.3 billion in Alphabet stock, is the counter-example that giving can be pointed and personal: Brin carries the genetic mutation his mother carried, and he has directed more than $1.1 billion toward Parkinson's disease research (Philanthropy News Digest).
The two elder statesmen of tech philanthropy are steadier. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, funded by the Intel co-founder who wrote Moore's Law, holds $11.5 billion and gives about $400 million a year to science, conservation, and patient care; its jump past $11 billion in 2024 traces to Moore's own death in 2023 and the estate distribution that followed (Moore Foundation). And the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is the structural experiment of the group. It is deliberately built as a limited liability company wrapped around a foundation and a donor-advised fund, a design that lets it invest in startups, lobby, and make political gifts, and that frees it from the five percent payout rule entirely (Wikipedia, "Chan Zuckerberg Initiative"). Its 501(c)(3) foundation alone holds $7.5 billion, and in 2025 it pledged at least $10 billion to basic science over a decade even as it shut down its diversity and immigration programs and, by early 2026, cut staff to go "all in" on curing disease (Science). The Laura and John Arnold Foundation, built on an Enron-and-hedge-fund energy fortune and now restructured as Arnold Ventures, uses the same modern toolkit of a charity plus an LLC plus a lobbying arm, aimed at evidence-based policy on drug prices, pensions, and criminal justice (Arnold Ventures).
The machines that give money away
The older, larger grantmakers reveal what these institutions actually are once the founder is gone: giant investment operations with a grant office attached. Read the compensation pages and the point is unmistakable, because at several of them the chief investment officer out-earns the president. At the Hewlett Foundation, the $14.2 billion HP fortune and the largest endowment in this post, the chief investment officer Ana Marshall was paid $5,661,092, more than six times the $845,372 that the new president Amber Miller earned, and Miller herself is a landmark, the foundation's first scientist and first woman to lead it (Hewlett; ProPublica). Hewlett granted about $690 million in 2024. At the MacArthur Foundation, the chief investment officer out-earned the president by more than two to one. These foundations invest their billions in exactly the public and private markets a pension fund uses, and they pay for the talent to do it accordingly.
The MacArthur Foundation, holder of about $9.3 billion and famous for the "genius grants" it has awarded since 1981, is doing something else worth watching: it broke the five percent floor. In response to federal funding cuts, it pushed its 2025 payout to 7.1 percent, roughly $190 million above its own plan, and said it would again exceed six percent in 2026 (MacArthur). The Spencer Foundation, the country's leading funder of education research at a comparatively small $665 million, is doing the same in miniature: after federal science cuts it launched rapid bridge grants and watched its large-grant applications quadruple from about 500 to nearly 2,000 (Chronicle of Higher Education). When Washington pulls back, the foundations' phones ring, and a few of them are choosing to spend down faster than the law requires rather than let the endowment keep compounding while the field starves. That is the sharpest live question in American philanthropy, and it is legible right on the payout line.
Two more deserve their own posts, and get them. The J. Paul Getty Trust, the wealthiest art institution on earth, is a foundation that is also a museum, running an $8.4 billion endowment and the Getty Center and Villa at once. And the MacArthur Foundation's genius-grant machine is worth reading in full for how a $9 billion endowment decides to break its own spending rule.
The single-purpose trusts and the community model
Not every big foundation gives broadly. The Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust, created by a 1935 will and holding $8.77 billion, exists to fund exactly one thing: the Nemours Foundation and its children's hospitals, into which it has poured more than $2.7 billion since the Depression (Wikipedia, "Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust"). It is the Girard model at industrial scale, a perpetual investment pool with a single named beneficiary and a fresh 2025 change of chairman. The Moody Foundation of Galveston, $3.53 billion from a 1942 insurance-and-banking fortune, has pledged $1 billion over two decades to transform Texas education (Moody Foundation). The Arie and Ida Crown Memorial, $1.45 billion from the Material Service and General Dynamics fortune, funds Chicago and Jewish causes and restructured its leadership after Jim Crown's death in a 2023 racing accident (Crain's). The Robert R. McCormick Foundation, $1.75 billion from the Chicago Tribune, funds journalism and civics and runs Colonel McCormick's Cantigny estate as a public park (McCormick Foundation). The two Pritzker foundations, the roughly $297 million Pritzker Traubert fund of former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and the roughly $281 million J.B. and M.K. Pritzker fund of the Illinois governor, both aim at Chicago, at economic mobility and early childhood. The $903 million Paul M. Angell Family Foundation runs on a Chicago food-manufacturing fortune and funds ocean conservation, the performing arts, and criminal-justice reform.
And one of them is a different species entirely. The Chicago Community Trust is not a family foundation but a community foundation, a public charity founded in 1915 that pools the gifts and donor-advised funds of many donors into one $6 billion regional endowment and granted about $1.5 billion across roughly 4,000 awards in a single year, now led by its first Latina chief executive (Chicago Community Trust). It is the plural version of everything else in this post: not one fortune giving, but a city's worth of them, invested together.
The one well, again
Add up the corpuses in this post and you are past a hundred billion dollars, and every dollar of it is invested in the same equity and security markets a retiree and a pension fund and a sovereign wealth fund are invested in too. That is why the chief investment officer out-earns the president. These foundations rise and fall with the markets exactly as ordinary savers do, and the same well this series keeps describing is where they all lower their buckets. Two features distinguish the new money from the old. First, more and more of it is single-stock wealth, Nvidia and Alphabet and Meta shares, compounding so fast that the five percent payout rule cannot keep the giving level with the growth, so the corpuses swell even as the checks go out. Second, more and more of the giving now routes through donor-advised funds, which means the public filing shows the money leaving the foundation but not where it lands. The old foundations were glass boxes you could read end to end. The new ones increasingly give through a one-way mirror. The tax return still tells you how much and how fast. It is starting to tell you less about where.
Related reading
- The Getty Trust: the wealthiest art institution on earth, a foundation that is also a museum.
- The MacArthur Foundation: the genius grants, and a $9 billion endowment breaking its own spending rule.
- The Working Ledgers and The Standing Institutions: the same reading method on research institutions and civic institutions.
- How Deathless Money Invests: the taxonomy of institutional money this series built on the older foundations.
- The Quiet Shelf: the smaller family foundations, read the same way.
Fact-check notes and sources
- All asset and grant figures are read from each foundation's most recent IRS Form 990 or 990-PF via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer; on 990-PF filings this post deliberately uses total assets and grants paid rather than the "total revenue" line, which is inflated by gross proceeds of securities sales. Per-foundation pages: Moore ($11.5B), Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation ($7.5B), Sergey Brin Family Foundation ($4.3B), Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation ($9.2B), Laura and John Arnold Foundation ($4.8B), MacArthur ($9.3B), Hewlett ($14.2B), Getty ($13.9B total assets), Alfred I. duPont Charitable Trust ($8.77B), Chicago Community Trust ($6B), Moody ($3.53B), Sarofim ($3.18B), Crown ($1.45B), McCormick ($1.75B), Spencer ($665M), Angell ($903M), Pritzker Traubert ($297M), J.B. and M.K. Pritzker ($281M), Hunter ($420M), DeSantis ($386M), Schoen ($412M), Stephens Greth ($2B), and the Barack Obama Foundation.
- The chief-investment-officer compensation exceeding the president's at Hewlett (Ana Marshall $5,661,092 vs president Amber Miller $845,372) and MacArthur (Susan Manske $2.51M vs John Palfrey $1.11M): the respective Form 990 Part VII pages via ProPublica.
- The Stephens Greth Foundation's roughly $2 billion founding, Autry Stephens, and the Endeavor sale to Diamondback: Wikipedia and World Oil; the April 2026 UT Southwestern gift per UT Southwestern.
- The Huang Foundation's 170 percent growth to $9.2 billion, no-staff structure, and DAF routing: Inside Philanthropy and Fortune. Larry Page's DAF routing: Inside Philanthropy. Sergey Brin's Parkinson's giving: Philanthropy News Digest.
- The CZI LLC-plus-foundation structure and the $10 billion science pledge: Wikipedia and Science. The Moore Foundation founding and giving: Moore Foundation. Arnold Ventures' structure: Arnold Ventures.
- MacArthur's 7.1 percent 2025 payout in response to federal cuts and the 1981 genius grants: MacArthur and Wikipedia. Spencer's bridge funding and the application surge: Chronicle of Higher Education.
- The duPont Trust's single-beneficiary structure funding Nemours: Wikipedia. The Chicago Community Trust as a 1915 community foundation granting about $1.5 billion: Chicago Community Trust. Moody's $1 billion Texas-education pledge: Moody Foundation. The Crown leadership change after Jim Crown's 2023 death: Crain's. The Schoen bequest and Habitat gift: Habitat Collier. DeSantis's Rexall Sundown and Celsius fortune: Forbes.
This post is informational and historical, not financial, tax, or philanthropic advice. All figures are reproduced from public filings and the public record. Organizations and individuals are discussed from the public record as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by any of them.
