Google cofounder Larry Page’s foundation doubled in size in recent years, hitting $6.7 billion in assets as of the end of 2021, the most recent year for which tax filings are available. The surging share price of Alphabet, the search engine’s parent company, vaulted the below-the-radar philanthropy into the company of the largest grantmakers in the United States.
The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation, named for the tech billionaire’s father, ended that year with an endowment that rivaled one of the country’s oldest and largest legacy institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation. The lack of other public information, coupled with the slow release of tax filings, make it hard to say with certainty where the foundation stands today. Market performance in the year and a half since then, and possible fund transfers, may have changed the picture further.
What we can say is that this philanthropy, which already had $2.9 billion in assets in 2018, is on a trajectory that points skyward. Keep in mind that the founder has an estimated $99 billion fortune.
The latest documents shed little light on who the foundation favors, revealing few details about the $227 million that the Palo Alto-based grantmaker distributed across 2020 and 2021. Nearly every penny went to a donor-advised fund at the National Philanthropic Trust, a philanthropic banking account that has no transparency or annual payout requirements.
The filings do show the leap in size came largely from investment gains, not new contributions. According to the foundation’s 990-PF forms, Page put nearly $700 million into his foundation over those two years, but that was overshadowed by more than $4 billion in gains from investments, but much of it coming from a spike in the share price of Alphabet, where he served as CEO until 2019. The company’s stock accounted for $3.5 billion of the institution’s $6.7 billion endowment at the end of 2021.
Alphabet’s stock price has come down somewhat since those filings, but its continued strength put Page’s foundation, one of the country’s least transparent mega-philanthropies, which lacks a website or any publicly listed staff, into the same tier of some of United States’ most well-known and powerful philanthropies. It’s one of several emerging philanthropic juggernauts, often bankrolled by tech or investment fortunes, with little public exposure.
The use of DAFs, often in combination with a private foundation, has been growing rapidly, especially by certain Silicon Valley billionaires. Elon Musk, for instance, recently met his foundation’s grantmaking requirements through distributions to a DAF. Some hedge funders also make heavy use of DAFs, such as billionaire Stephen Mandel, Jr. Page has long been criticized by outlets like the Washington Post and Vox for operating at the extreme end of this practice.
With Page’s foundation and other such operations now rivaling the size of some of the country’s largest philanthropies and a public commitment by the Biden administration to rewrite the current rules, there may be more attention on these practices in the years ahead.
What do we know about Page’s grantmaking?
Not much. The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation made more than $600 million in grants between 2017 and 2021. But its tax filings offer almost no clues as to where the money went. Some 97.8% of that sum went into virtual philanthropic black boxes, i.e., DAFs, including at the National Philanthropic Trust and Schwab Charitable Fund.
The foundation filings listed just two other recipients. First, it sent a $1,000 check to the American Cancer Society in 2020, as it also did two years before. Second, the foundation sent a series of five-figure checks to the New Venture Fund, one of the nation’s largest multi-cause intermediaries. Those contributions totaled nearly $200,000 over three years and went to support the Science Philanthropy Alliance. Every other listed recipient in the last five years was a DAF.
What other hints are there?
The best insight into Page’s priorities comes from outside his foundation’s grantmaking.
The philanthropy has long financed a program, Shoo the Flu, as a direct charitable expense. (Unlike a grant, such expenses include significant involvement by the foundation.) The initiative works with the Alameda County Public Health Department and Oakland Unified School District, among other partners, to provide students free flu shots. Since 2017, the foundation has spent nearly $1.9 million on the program, though support shrunk during the pandemic.
The effort aligns with one of the 50-year-old’s rare publicly disclosed gifts, as well as his reported interests. Back in 2014, Page pledged $15 million from his foundation to battle Ebola, as well as nearly that much from Google. He also is said to have spent much of the pandemic on a private island in Fiji with his family, possibly due to contagion concerns.
Science is, unsurprisingly, another theme in Page’s giving. He serves on the 22-member board of trustees for the XPrize, a major science competition that Elon Musk notably partnered with to back carbon removal efforts.
Page’s wife, Lucinda Southworth, also founded an LLC, Oceankind. The group, which supports ocean ecosystems around the globe, has funded groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Ocean Conservancy, Global Fishing Watch and the Nature Conservancy. It recently backed the Mosaic initiative, a participatory grantmaking intermediary that funds environmental movement infrastructure.
What else do the filings show?
The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation has few public grantees and zero staff, according to its IRS forms, but it does rack up healthy expenses, averaging about 11% of grantmaking. In the last couple years of filings, a mixture of taxes and professional fees have accounted for most of those costs, including multimillion-dollar federal excise tax bills and millions in investment management fees.
Like a lot of low-profile foundations of billionaires, it appears to rely on outside groups to manage its operations, particularly its investing. These include financial giant Morgan Stanley, the Palo Alto-based tax and accounting service Rosewood Family Advisors and lesser-known investment firms in Austin, Texas, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
For now, as you can tell, little is known about Larry Page’s operation. That makes it not too much different than those of other similarly secretive peers. Yet if tech stocks keep rising, the philanthropies of such Silicon Valley billionaires could soon rise to supplant all but the largest foundations in the nation. If so, it seems likely that they will find themselves in the spotlight whether they like it or not.
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