The traditional way to start a story about the best-paid leaders in a particular sector, whether in institutional philanthropy or elsewhere, is to name the individual with the biggest compensation package. Let’s get that out of the way.
Elizabeth Alexander, the poet-turned-president of the Mellon Foundation, was paid more than any other leader of a top 40 legacy foundation in 2024, receiving salary and benefits that topped $2.2 million.
Not far behind her was Darren Walker, the now-departed president of the Ford Foundation, who received a nearly $2.1 million pay package that year; after them was Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, with total compensation of almost $1.9 million.
All three received about twice the average compensation of a top 40 legacy foundation leader in 2024: $1.07 million. All figures in this story are for that year, either calendar or fiscal, which is the most recent for which IRS filings are available across all 40 foundations.
But the question of which foundation president was best paid relative to their responsibilities is an entirely different matter, and arguably far more interesting, if difficult to answer definitively.
Even within legacy philanthropy’s higher reaches, one foundation’s endowment may be two, three or four times the size of a peer, if not more, with grantmaking budgets, portfolios, operations and teams that are proportionately larger and more complex. With scale, of course, can come greater prominence, pressure and scrutiny. Each of these factors presumably reflect the weight of responsibilities on a leader.
Compensation is also affected by the success of a leader’s initiatives, their influence within the field and the experience they bring to the role, and other less-tangible qualities. This analysis, however, is concerned with what can be measured in raw numbers and compared directly with peers.
To some ears, ‘best paid’ may seem like a synonym for ‘overpaid.’ Yet this analysis — based purely on what can be quantified based on public data — isn’t trying to make that call. Nor is it attempting to contest sector norms or pay scales, benchmarks that guide many boards. Rather, it seeks to evaluate compensation using the quantifiable metrics of foundations as uniformly reported in 990s — and thus provide measures that adjust, if imperfectly, for the responsibilities of each leader.
Based on public data I compiled about the compensation of leaders at the nation’s largest 40 legacy funders — based on their endowments in 2024 — here are some other ways to think about who is the best-paid leader. These measures go beyond the headline compensation figure by considering the size of an institution’s endowment, how much money it grants, how many grants it issued and how many employees its leader oversees. And, most interestingly of all, we’ll see where we land if we combine them all.
Admittedly, the particularities, if not peculiarities, of a given foundation’s operations may be a poor fit with some of these measures. For instance, some philanthropies’ grant counts include employee matching awards, others do not, and there’s no easy way to adjust for that variance. For another, some foundations make PRIs while others focus on mission-related investing, but both have been omitted from this analysis as tax filings only detail the former. I’ve adjusted certain foundations’ figures to include additional institutions under their leader’s control, based on communication with those operations. Yet thoroughly accounting for every single philanthropic quirk here goes beyond the scope of this article.
Legacy foundation leaders are paid $1 for every $6,437 in foundation assets, on average
If you judge philanthropic leaders based on how much they are paid relative to how much money is under their responsibility, Alexander, Walker and Shah are no longer at the head of the pack. Instead, the best-paid leader in the top 40 is David K. Roger of Hillman Family Foundations.
Compared to Hillman’s $1.9 billion endowment, Roger’s $890,939 pay package in 2024 was the largest per-endowment dollar among the top 40. Roger receives about $1 in compensation for every $2,135 in Hillman assets. (As is the case for every endowment total mentioned in this article, Hillman’s figure is taken from the organization’s most recent 990, which lists the fair market value of all assets at the end of the fiscal year covered by the filing.)
Roger is not the top dog by much. Runners-up for the best-paid leaders by this measure include Sam Gill of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and other Duke philanthropies ($1 for every $2,177) and Chris DeCardy of the Heinz Endowments ($2,294).
In contrast to the names listed above, the average leader received $1 for every $6,437 in the endowment. Admittedly, this measure leads to lower rankings for most leaders of larger foundations, since compensation does not rise in lockstep with endowments. Yet you can find leaders at plenty of modestly sized institutions who are paid between the average and the median, i.e., between $6,437 and $3,968.
Examples include Ridgeway H. White of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation ($1 per $4,178), Ann Ziker of Brown Foundation ($1 per $4,581) and Shawn McCaney of the William Penn Foundation ($6,157). All three philanthropies have assets of less than $4 billion.
At the other end of the spectrum, leaders who managed the most money compared with how much they were paid were, unsurprisingly, those leading foundations with some of the largest endowments: N. Clay Robbins of the Lilly Endowment ($1 for every $59,080 in assets) and Richard Besser of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($11,674). Walker, who had the second-largest compensation package in 2024, actually comes in third here ($8,507). A $2 million bargain!
Legacy leaders are paid $1 per $185 in foundation grants
Arguably, dollars out the door is a better measure than money in the bank. In other words, we should measure executive compensation not by how big a foundation’s endowment is but by how much funding it gives out. Doing so results in a very similar list at both ends.
If we count only grant dollars, DeCardy of Heinz takes the crown as best-paid in this calculation. Using his $965,961 compensation, his institution issued $88 in grants for every dollar it paid him. Just behind him was Gill of Doris Duke ($90), Lisa M. Lawson of Annie E. Casey Foundation ($94) and Roger of Hillman ($100).
Incidentally, counting all charitable disbursements, i.e., not just the grants but the tax-deductible expenses of making them and the programs foundations run themselves, registers only one significant change. Lawson drops from the list, given the significant amount of programming Annie E. Casey carries out directly, Roger climbs into second, and Rachel Monroe of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation joins the finalists.
To put those figures in context, the median compensation for top 40 legacy leaders was $1 per every $185 granted. Again, this is a measure that favors larger foundations. But you can find high-profile leaders of more modest foundations close to this level, such as Maribel Perez Wadsworth of Knight Foundation ($1 for every $155 in grants) and Tonya Allen of McKnight ($180).
The order at the far end is unchanged. Out in front was Robbins of Lilly ($1,671), followed by Besser ($542) and Walker ($409).
Legacy leaders are paid $2,136 per foundation grant, on average
Then again, one could argue that a leader’s compensation should reflect their organization’s work in choosing, vetting and supporting each grantee, not the amount of money sent out. If that’s true, a better measure would be comparing compensation based on how many total grants an institution sends out.
Under those rules, P. Russell Hardin is the most handsomely paid leader among top legacy funders. Hardin is the president of both the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation and the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation, each of which specialize in a low-volume, big-award style of grantmaking, making just 30 and 42 grants, respectively, in 2024.
Per grant issued, both foundations paid him more in 2024 than any other top 40 president. His $498,146 compensation at Woodruff in 2024 works out to $16,605 per grant, while his $239,192 package at Whitehead that year comes to $5,695 per award there. (Note: Hardin’s compensation from Woodruff in 2024 was nearly 40% higher than in a normal year due to retirement-related retention payment, according to a spokesperson. However, he would lead this category even without that additional money.)
Other leaders that received much more compensation per grant than an average leader in 2024 included Shah of Rockefeller ($4,859 per grant), Jehuda Reinharz of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation and its related supporting organizations ($4,515 per grant) and Elizabeth Alexander of the Mellon Foundation ($2,596).
With the exception of Alexander, each of those leaders earns twice the average amount per grant ($2,136) and three times the median amount ($1,470). This measure also appears to favor foundations with large endowments, given the fact that more money generally means more grants. Examples of leaders who are paid around the average or median level per grant include Louise Richardson of the Andrew Carnegie Foundation ($2,166), Don Howard of the James Irvine Foundation ($1,612) and Karen McNeil-Miller of the Colorado Health Foundation ($1,498).
On the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of dollars per grant, the names are similar, with Besser of RWJF ($372), Walker of Ford ($513) and McCaney of Penn ($543) in the lead. Besser and Walker keep securing the lowest-paid spots in part because they head some of the sector’s largest institutions, which means larger denominators in these calculations. Yet this analysis also suggests that compensation does not really change much even if your foundation is one-third or one-quarter the size of the sector’s largest employers.
Legacy leaders are paid $11,700 per employee
Of course, all the above work — managing assets, making grants, choosing grantees — is actually done, at least at most institutions of this size, by a foundation’s staff. A leader’s fundamental task is to lead the team doing that work. Perhaps, then, we should evaluate their compensation based on how many people they oversee.
By this metric, Roger of Hillman lands atop the podium for the second time. He pulled in $74,245 in compensation for each of Hillman’s 12 other employees. Other top earners by this standard are Ziker of Brown Foundation ($68,514); Hardin of Whitehead ($59,798) and Woodruff ($49,815); and Sam Reiman, who leads both the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the much-smaller Richard King Mellon Family Foundation ($47,379). By this measure, each receives at least twice the average compensation per employee ($18,422) and four times or more the median ($11,700).
On the other end are some of the largest grantmaking staffs in the business. Leading this list are Besser of RWJF ($3,494), Lawson of Casey ($4,792) and La June Montgomery Tabron of W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($5,471).
This measure correlates pretty tightly with staff size, meaning mostly leanly staffed operations have landed atop it. It also counts only employees paid $50,000 or more, as 990s do not list staff paid less than that. Those are among the reasons this analysis puts less emphasis on any one measure than on the combined score — as I lay out below, after a few caveats.
The complicating factors in ranking compensation
Private foundations all report to the IRS using the same 990-PF form, whose uniform numbers make the comparisons in this article possible. Yet the operations behind those numbers can vary dramatically. Before revealing the best-paid leaders, here are some of the most significant complicating factors in these rankings.
Sam Gill, the leader of Doris Duke, is a prime example of perhaps the most common adjustment made in this analysis. He not only leads the foundation, but also several legally separate entities, including Duke Farms and the Shangri La Museum. The figures in this analysis therefore reflect combined data from those organizations. I made similar calculations for Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, the Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. It’s possible that other leaders warrant similar adjustments, but I only made them for leaders who landed atop one of these measures and, when contacted for comment, provided additional context about their responsibilities.
Gill, incidentally, is also an example of the type of minor, institution-specific adjustments also required for this analysis. He is paid by the Doris Duke Management Foundation, not the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, so his compensation figures are pulled from the former’s 990-PFs.
There were also factors that could not be controlled. Shah and Rockefeller illustrate one of these challenges, though it does not affect their rankings. The foundation used to report a much higher number of grants on its 990-PF form, because it included hundreds of small employee match grants. Rockefeller ended that practice in 2024, meaning that its compensation per grant ranking is accurate here. But other top 40 legacy funders, such as Annie E. Casey Foundation, still report such grants, meaning their leaders rank lower on this scale.
Jehuda Reinharz and the Mandel foundation, meanwhile, demonstrate a different challenge. The compensation-per-grant and per-grant-dollar measures disadvantage leaders of philanthropies that put more money than their peers toward direct charitable activities versus grants. In Reinharz’s case, his responsibilities include the Mandel Foundation-Israel, which runs several educational and training centers, but whose public filings show no grants in 2024, likely contributing to his high compensation-per-grant ranking. A similar dynamic is at play with Gill of Doris Duke, who landed among the top leaders in the compensation-per-grant-dollar category. (On the other hand, leading multiple institutions improves the rankings of both Reinharz and Gill in the compensation-per-employee category.)
Who is the best-paid top legacy leader of them all?
The measures above leave us with a handful of finalists for the title of best-paid leader among America’s top 40 foundations. Five different candidates earned first-place finishes: Hardin of Woodruff and Whitehead (per grant), Alexander of Mellon (largest amount), DeCardy of Heinz (per grant dollar), and Roger of Hillman (per dollar of assets and per employee). Others never finished first, but ranked among the finalists in multiple categories. Shah of Rockefeller and Gill of Doris Duke both made the finisher’s list in two categories.
But since a single high rank may simply reflect a measure that is a poor fit for a given organization, it seems fairer to find each leader’s average ranking among all of these measures to fashion an overall score.
The resulting list of best-paid list leaders is made up of mostly familiar names. Fifth place is a tie between Reiman of Mellon and Roger of Hillman; fourth is Shah of Rockefeller; third goes to Gill of Duke; second is awarded to Monroe of Weinberg; and in the top spot, if very narrowly, is Decardy of Heinz.
DeCardy ranks 26th in total compensation, but he ranks in the top 10 for compensation per employee, the top five for compensation per dollar of assets, and No. 1 among active leaders in compensation per grant dollar. Put together, that makes him the best-paid leader among America’s top 40 legacy funders, at least by these measures.
Yet focusing solely on DeCardy makes little sense. There is less than a point of difference by this average between him and the next three finishers: Monroe, Gill and Shah.
Here’s another way to think about this analysis, this time spotlighting Shah. He leads a legacy foundation, Rockefeller, with the 13th-largest endowment and 14th-largest grantmaking budget, and he receives the third-largest salary among leaders of top 40 legacy foundations. These rankings are an attempt to measure such differences.
In fairness to DeCardy, Shah and other current leaders, it’s actually a former leader who registers the most dramatic ranking score. I’ve omitted from this narrative leaders who have left their foundations since 2024, with an exception for Darren Walker due to Ford’s prominence. But the top rank of all was achieved by former Alfred P. Sloan Foundation President Adam Falk, whose $1.3 million compensation package in 2024 means he was paid more per assets and more per grant dollar than any other leader, and my averaging of all these rankings put him well above everyone else. (Falk did not respond to requests for comment by press time.)
“Not a fair or accurate representation”
Asked about their leaders’ high ranks by these measures, several foundations pointed to their due diligence process. Most emphasized that their boards follow industry practices to ensure compensation is reasonable and appropriate based on sector data. Hillman and Heinz were among the foundations that shared statements along these lines.
“As a long-standing practice, The Heinz Endowments’ Board of Directors determines the president’s compensation based on best practices, including benchmarking with other similarly situated foundations,” said a spokesperson in a statement. “Our benchmarking utilizes sector-specific survey data and peer group analysis from established, independent sources.”
Others asserted that their leader’s responsibilities could not be captured by the measures in this analysis.
“[Reinharz] is responsible for the operation of significant programs in the U.S. and in Israel, which is not appropriately captured by a simple analysis of compensation divided by grants,” said Mark Madeja, chief operating officer of the Mandel foundation, via email. “Therefore, placing him as the ‘best-paid designation’ is not a fair or accurate representation.”
Several foundations, including Rockefeller, Mellon, Sloan and Weinberg, either did not respond to requests or declined to comment.
Legacy leaders get paid nearly as well even at the smallest institutions on this list
Highlighting these individuals should not distract from what I believe is the larger takeaway. Most of these measures correlate, noticeably if not perfectly, with foundation size. After weeks of going over these numbers, I’ve come to think of this as the clearest distillation of the situation: At the top end of legacy philanthropy, a leader’s pay has relatively little relationship to the size or prominence of the institution they head.
With the exception of Mellon, Ford and Rockefeller, not a single legacy foundation paid its leader more than $1.4 million in 2024. In fact, some presidents earned significantly less than that, even those leading some of the sector’s largest institutions. Yet nearly all top 40 legacy funders paid their presidents almost as much, with most compensation packages landing between $1.2 million and $800,000 a year, even if they lead an institution that by most measures is one-third or one-fourth the size of those near the top of the list, if not smaller.
(At a glance, some evidence suggests the nation’s biggest legacy funders have gender and possibly racial pay gaps among their leaders — for instance, men dominate my best-paid categories, while many women are at the average or median — but a more detailed analysis is needed to be definitive.)
The relatively flat pay scale suggests that the people paying these leaders, i.e., the boards of top 40 institutions, have decided that leading a $3 billion foundation making $150 million a year in grants deserves nearly the same pay as heading a $9 billion foundation making $400 million a year in grants.
To illustrate this phenomenon more vividly — and again, at the risk of again putting too much focus on individuals and situations with their own caveats — here are some comparisons.
DeCardy, the president of Heinz (which had $2.2 billion in assets and made $85 million a year in grants in 2024), pulled in a total compensation of $987,940, while Heather Kukla, president of Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, which includes the Anne Ray Foundation (together totalling $8.2 billion in assets and $313 million in grants) received $1,078,057. That’s just a 9% difference.
Reiman, the director of the Richard King Mellon foundations ($3.5 billion in combined assets, $127 million in grants in 2024), received a total compensation package of $1,042,332 that year, while Nancy Linborg, CEO and president of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation ($8.5 billion in assets, $350 million in grants) earned $1,091,158. That’s a less than 5% difference.
And Shah of Rockefeller ($6.4 billion combined assets, $233 million in grants in 2024) received $1.9 million in compensation, while Harvey Fineberg, the now-former president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ($11.5 billion in assets, $400 million in grants), earned $1.4 million — i.e., substantially less.
I would have guessed that leaders of smaller legacy institutions would consistently earn substantially less than those at the largest funders. But that is not how it works.
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes all feedback, and tips.
