Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on January 14, 2025.
For more than decade, Larry Page and Lucinda Southworth were the most secretive megadonors in the foundation world.
Between 2012 and 2022, the Google cofounder and his wife sent 99.9% of the dollars they granted from the Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation to donor-advised funds. Since those accounts have limited transparency requirements, it’s impossible to know whether the more than $1.2 billion the couple gave to DAFs has ever reached working charities.
Veteran chronicler of Silicon Valley’s bigwigs Theodore Schleifer, now with the New York Times, once wrote that Page was performing “philanthropic sleight of hand.” Longtime sector consultant Alan Cantor has called the move a “paper-shuffling scheme.” Last year, I ranked Page No. 1 among what I called the black box billionaires.
But with an IRS filing late last year, the centibillionaire couple have taken a small step into the sunlight — one that revealed them as climate philanthropists. For the first time since Barack Obama’s first presidential term, the pair’s $6.3 billion foundation has disclosed where a substantial chunk of its money is going.
The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation sent 13 grants totalling $66 million to organizations other than DAFs in 2023, according to its 990-PF form. The beneficiaries are mostly major climate intermediaries and winners of the Audacious Prize, the TED-run billionaire prize competition and funding collaborative.
This is a degree more transparency than the Palo Alto, California-based grantmaker has ever previously provided, yet there is still no way for observers to know which nonprofits — if any — benefitted from the remaining $219 million sum that the couple’s foundation sent to DAFs in 2023 — i.e., 77% of the foundation’s payout.
Foundation representatives did not respond to phone calls and emails.
The centibillionaire couple favor big climate regrantors, Audacious Project winners
Like many billionaires in climate, Page and Southworth sent their foundation’s biggest awards to regrantors in the ClimateWorks Foundation network, which was set up by legacy funders in part as infrastructure for ultra-wealthy donors like the Google cofounder to funnel money into climate causes. Recipients in 2023 included the European Climate Foundation ($23 million, two grants), Brazil-based Instituto Climate e Sociedad ($10 million) and the U.S. Energy Foundation ($4 million).
The foundation also made grants to well-known intermediaries. One went to“help bridge the gap between federal investments and communities” ($15 million via RF Catalytic Capital), which is likely for the regranting collaborative Invest in Our Future, set up for that purpose and is managed by RFCC. Other grants went to “promote movement infrastructure” ($2 million via The Tides Center) and to the major environmental group World Resources Institute ($4.8 million).
The couple are also clearly fans of the Audacious Project, though Audacious does not currently include Page and Southworth, or the foundation, in its list of public supporters. In 2023, foundation checks went to Audacious winners Global Fishing Watch ($3 million), Clean Slate Initiative ($1 million via New Venture Fund), the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley ($750,000), and Think of Us ($500,000). The European Climate Foundation and World Resource Institute are also Audacious awardees.
There were just a pair of grantees that weren’t either climate regrantors or Audacious winners. One was People’s Courage International ($2 million), which supports networks of community-based groups in South and Southeast Asia, and the other was Upstream USA ($500,000), a national contraceptive care organization.
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Hints about what the foundation backed in 2024
These 2023 grant payments are not the only new information in this IRS filing. We also get a peek at what the foundation funded in 2024.
The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation approved $60 million in future payments in 2023, nearly all of it to the same list of Audacious awardees, along with People’s Courage International and Upstream USA, though the filing did not list totals by recipient for those grants.
The filing also offered some hints about the intended purpose of the 2024 DAF grants, albeit vague ones.
The foundation’s $218 million transfer to Schwab Charitable was for “grantmaking support aimed at protecting the planet, alleviating poverty, promoting equity and improving healthcare.” The National Philanthropic Trust received another $1 million for “general grantmaking support.”
Yet the latest filing does get more specific about the foundation’s $30 million in administrative expenses, i.e., payments to Morgan Stanley and other investment management firms, excise and foreign taxes, tax and accounting fees to Rosewood Family Advisors, and portfolio deductions.
In other words, we know more about those expenses than where three-quarters of the foundation’s grant dollars went.
One challenge with an organization this opaque is determining who’s in charge. Most coverage of the foundation, including my own, has named only Page as the foundation’s leader — and it seems safe to assume the foundation’s enormous endowment comes from his fortune alone. Yet Southworth has been on the board since 2012 and currently serves as a director and the foundation’s CFO. The foundation was already sending most of its multimillion-dollar payouts to DAFs before she arrived, but after a decade, it seems overdue to give her equal credit for its choices today.
The couple’s new step toward transparency is notable, but it leaves so much unanswered that all I feel I can say for certain is that the foundation has a green… leg. The rest is still behind the curtain.
