A highly successful Tennessee auto dealer. An early investor in Warren Buffett’s conglomerate. The widow of a Johnson & Johnson heir.
America’s Great Wealth Transfer will involve millions of such individuals and their stories, largely fitting into the same basic narrative: a wealthy older person leaving a fortune to their descendants — and possibly some to philanthropy, too.
These three cases stand out because each left a substantial chunk of their wealth to their foundations — turning all three into grantmakers with a quarter-billion dollars or more in assets. The Bill Gatton Foundation, Gottesman Fund and Betty Wold Johnson Foundation have each tripled or more in size since the passing of their founders, offering early examples of how this accelerating generational shift may create a whole new set of philanthropic power players.
We’ve been prognosticating about the Great Wealth Transfer for a while, and it’s already well underway. Around $84 trillion is expected to be passed down to younger Americans by 2045, including $16 trillion in the next decade, according to the New York Times. Even if only a small share of that goes to charity, it could rewrite the philanthropic landscape.
Total U.S. foundation assets only recently topped $1.5 trillion — i.e., one-10th of what will be transferred to the younger generation in the next 10 years — and that already represents accelerating growth from just $500 billion circa 2009. (Not to mention the fast-paced growth of donor-advised fund assets over the past two decades.) Meanwhile, the GOP’s recently passed budget and President Donald Trump’s drastic antiregulatory stance foreshadows even more rapid gains among the very rich and any grantmaking institutions they endow.
More urgently, amid an across-the-board withdrawal of federal funding, these are three grantmakers who can write a lot more checks right now, if they choose. Under the 5% payout rule, each foundation has either already ramped up its grantmaking to match its newfound assets, or will need to soon.
Given that all three operations lack websites or other public presence, this trio is also a reminder that much of this transition may largely escape notice, even with substantial dollars at stake. Here’s what we know about these operations’ past funding and priorities, based on IRS filings from late last year.
Bill Gatton Foundation: Auto dealer’s $900 million outfit jumpstarts Southern universities
Carol Martin “Bill” Gatton owned nine auto dealerships across Tennessee, Alabama and Texas and a sizable real estate portfolio. Established in the late 1980s, his eponymous foundation grew steadily during his lifetime into a substantial regional grantmaker. His 2022 death tripled its size, leaving the Bristol, Tennessee-based operation with an endowment topping $900 million.
Gatton was fond of writing big checks to Southern universities, and his foundation has continued doing so in his absence. As of 2023, the foundation had never awarded more than $11 million in a single year. But recently, it has announced several individual gifts larger than that amount. It appears the institution — whose current assets would now require it to grant roughly $45 million annually to reach 5% — plans to meet that mark by amping up its awards to regional universities.
In 2020, the foundation pledged $13.5 million to the University of Kentucky for a student center, previewing what was to come after its founder’s death. In 2024, it announced awards of $14 million for scholarships and other programs at King University in Bristol, Tennessee, $16 million to the University of Kentucky’s diabetes center, and $11.2 million to the University of Virginia at Wise campus for scholarships and facilities improvements.
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Gottesman Fund: Jewish funder now has $1.3 billion endowment
Thanks largely to an early investment in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, David “Sandy” Gottesman had a roughly $3 billion fortune when he died in 2022, according to Forbes. He and his wife, Ruth, were known during his lifetime for supporting a range of Jewish institutions through their Washington, D.C.-based foundation, with grantmaking topping out at about $25 million a year.
But that was then. Since his death, the institution’s assets have grown five-fold, following a 2023 infusion that increased its endowment to $1.3 billion. Grantmaking will need to jump to roughly $65 million a year. Early last year, Ruth Gottesman also made headlines by donating $1 billion — apparently in addition to what was transferred to the foundation — to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to make free tuition available to all future students.
What might come next for the Gottesman Fund? Her recent mega gift suggests a willingness to go big, but Ruth Gottesman also shares leadership of the foundation with her children, Alice, Robert and William. In recent years, the Gottesman Fund has given dozens of four- and five-figure awards to Jewish groups, along with a handful of larger awards. The big checks — though still orders of magnitude smaller than Ruth Gottesman’s medical tuition commitment — go to classic New York institutions like Central Park Conservatory ($5.3 million) and the American Museum of Natural History ($5.2 million) and to Jewish organizations like the PEF Israel Endowment Funds ($4.1 million) and Yeshiva University ($3 million).
Betty Wold Johnson Foundation: The $700 million operation of the “First Lady of the Jets”
Drawing on the fortune left by her late husband, Robert Wood Johnson III, heir to the Johnson & Johnson empire, Betty Wold Johnson was a well-known regional donor in New York and New Jersey before her 2020 death. She was known as “the First Lady of the Jets” by the NFL players employed by her sons, who own the New York Jets.
Wold Johnson backed cultural institutions including the Nature Conservancy of New Jersey, the Princeton Public Library and Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also backed at least one cause that directly impacted her family, giving $50 million to the Lupus Research Alliance ($50 million) after her granddaughter contracted the disease.
Her eponymous foundation, whose endowment went from zero a few years ago to over $740 million as of 2023, has taken a very different focus since her death, with almost no ties to New Jersey, New York or lupus. Its leadership includes her sons, Christopher Johnson and Robert W. Johnson IV, who are listed as foundation “co-presidents,” as well as Ira Akselrad, who leads the Johnson family office and is also listed as the foundation’s “president,” and two other members of the family office.
Located in Palm Beach, Florida, the foundation lists just two grantees over the two years since its first transfer from Johnson’s estate. One is Harvard Business School, which has received just over $20 million for a “professorship of business administration, climate and environment.” The other is West Chester, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit Amigos of Costa Rica, which was granted $206,000 for a pilot project that transformed a street in the village of Nosara on the country’s western coast. Regardless of where its money goes, the foundation will need to start getting more money out the door to meet the 5% minimum payout rate — which at present would be about $37 million a year.
