Dear New Philanthropists

Most 20th century institutions are unfit for 21st century problems. Will this generation’s winning innovators build new ones, or get hoodwinked by the old ones?

Robert Conquest’s third law of politics is as follows:

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

That line has always sounded funny because it is exaggerated; it keeps being useful because, in case after case, it is not exaggerated enough. Universities that are supposed to cultivate excellence and bring up the most talented young people in our society as leaders instead teach them contempt for our history and values. Charities that were created to help the needy have reoriented themselves almost entirely to help the overpaid people who run them (and often, their friends & political allies, too). In cases that sometimes sound too stupid to be true, orchestras have embraced racial audition policies; leading art museums have fired elderly volunteers who give free tours to the public… for being white. While these organizations differ in their specific flavor of brokenness, they invariably share one important characteristic: their crazy, destructive behavior is paid for and encouraged by wealthy donors who should know better, or do know better but are too cowardly to stop giving or do anything about it.

The SPLC is a particularly vivid and absurd current example of Conquest’s 3rd Law: earlier this year, the Justice Department indicted the civil rights organization (at this point that’s a loose description) on fraud and money-laundering charges tied to over $3 million in payments to white nationalist extremist groups — groups off of whose actions the SPLC was able to fundraise handsomely from prominent and well-resourced Americans. Whether any of those people will update their mental model of the very respectable people who solicited the donation… remains to be seen. This widespread cowardice is becoming a crisis for our civilization.

The 20th century built many astonishing things. It built universities, research labs, agencies, hospitals, foundations, media companies, and civic organizations that shaped the modern world. But today, many donors are still judging Harvard, Yale, the SPLC, the ACLU, and countless other institutions by what they were in the 1980s or 1990s, not by what they are today — ignoring clear evidence of brokenness. Meanwhile, the most transcendent human achievements now tend to come from new models.

SpaceX has restored the American imagination around space and pushed the frontier. This is not an argument against NASA’s heroic past, just a recognition that the frontier was reopened by a new organization with different incentives and a very different risk tolerance. AI research in America has been built around talent density, technical seriousness, speed, and new organizational assumptions. “The labs” are unique 21st century institutions, capturing outsized value thanks to winning models.

This is the part that should make the donor class stop and think — especially the new donor class being formed right now. Amazing things are still happening. Human beings are still capable of doing things that would have sounded impossible a generation ago. But again and again, the energy is coming from new forms, new organizations, new incentives.

Between the SpaceX IPO — the largest public offering in history — and forthcoming offerings from AI firms, we’re about to have tens of thousands of ultra-wealthy, new philanthropists. They are people who’ve become wealthy as a result of participating in these new models and bold organizations. The outstanding question is: are they going to do new things in philanthropy, too? Are they going to be fighters? Or will they be conquered by the conquered institutions?

This is a letter to those people.

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The vast majority love being loved. They want to do things that get them praised and not cause stress or attacks on their business, so they skip out on the most important work, or convince themselves that work requiring less courage is “just as good.” And philanthropic organizations have spent decades learning exactly what to say to exactly this type of person. The scores of NGOs, the university development offices, the partisan donor networks — these are essentially evolved parasites, and the host is a wealthy person with a conscience and social ambitions. Every touchpoint has been A/B tested across thousands of interactions in order to make them feel good, get them to open their checkbook, and make sure they don’t get too curious about the internal workings of the organizations they are now underwriting.

If you want a quick validation of this claim, ask any university trustee in America whether they know anything about the classes that are being offered in the ethnic studies, anthropology, classics, history, sociology, or related departments at their school. What percent of those professors love our civilization and its principles? Have they ever discussed this with the President of their university? Do they know what’s going on in the building that bears their family name?

A few archetypes recur among ultra-wealthy people who could be making a difference, but instead are exploited by our legacy institutions:

Private Lives. Some entrepreneurs are engaged in businesses that are not meant to draw attention, or have complicated personal lives, or families who would suffer from public attack. Even if you have done nothing wrong, the media can spin up stories to make you look like a villain.

Instinctive Cowards. If you’re smart enough, you can construct an airtight case for inaction. The vastness of the universe, the complexity of systems, the long arc of history, whatever it is. The socialists will take over healthcare anyway; it’s structurally determined. I have heard versions of this from a genius billionaire, delivered with complete conviction.

Most of our human cognition works this way: we begin with what we want — comfort, safety, not to get involved in some messy fight — and we reason backwards to justify it. We pretend we are acting based on reason, but we are acting based on what our intuition and desires have already shaped in our minds. The professorial and scientific types, people whose identity is built around thinking rather than rashly acting — quite common among technologists — are especially vulnerable to this.

Too Old to Rethink. Professor Arthur Brooks has a model of fluid versus crystallized intelligence. In our older years, our fluid intelligence — highly adaptable, responsive to new inputs — gives way to crystallized intelligence. On the positive side, crystallized intelligence can look like built-up wisdom or mental models; on the negative side, it can be like mental ski tracks, out of which we are unlikely to turn, even when our surroundings do.

Because of compounding, many don’t approach the really significant levels of wealth until the age where they are less likely to do new things, and where even with an avalanche of evidence that institutions are broken, they will have a hard time updating their mental models. This is very common with great men I admire. Many are still bright and aware of what is going on. But their view of the world is stuck from when they had more fluid intelligence: the 1980s, the 1990s, the period when many of these institutions were still basically functional, or at least not entirely conquered. They are judging the broken institutions by what they were, not what they are.

As ever, there’s a balance. The older person who has built several companies across four decades has genuinely learned things that a thirty-five-year-old policy entrepreneur has not, let alone a twenty-something working on startups fresh out of school. The question is whether that accumulated knowledge is being deployed toward the fight properly.

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Your Fighting Years

Thinking about policy and philanthropy is a genuinely tough thing at any age, but if one isn’t paying attention to these things in the prime company-building years, it becomes less and less possible to build them right later on.

At scale, the effect of compounding — even from small amounts of wealth — is that almost all of the philanthropic money is centered on people who are not in a phase of life to effectively resist the forces of brokenness. This makes it doubly essential that people put up the personal risk and time to learn new frameworks when they are in their prime entrepreneurial years.

To help conceptualize the challenge, consider five levels of engagement. The vast majority of people who could be on our side in key civilizational battles are stuck in levels 1 or 2 for some of the reasons I’ve discussed above. It’s a personal goal of mine to bring as many as possible into levels 4 and 5 over the next few years.

Level One is supporting what is broken in the most straightforward way possible: massive checks to dysfunctional institutions. Harvard and Yale have too much of their administration and faculty conquered, their culture broken, discouraging virtue and love of liberty in the most promising young people in the country. Writing them a large check may feel like gratitude. Too often it is civilizational self-harm with a building named after you to cement the dishonor.

Level Two is supporting what is broken but in a clever way. You want to give to your university, but you direct it to a special program, or the sports team, or an endowed chair in something you care about. You tell yourself you have threaded the needle. Maybe in some rare cases you have. But usually you are still strengthening the brand and the institution. You have freed up unrestricted funds elsewhere, provided reputational cover, and gotten yourself socially captured inside the institution’s network, all while feeling strategic about it.

This is where the lying becomes most sophisticated. University presidents and politicians often play a similar role: they tell entrepreneur types what they want to hear, expressing supposedly shared values, while delivering real power to the interests and activists who are their actual constituents. They are expert at making a major donor feel heard while the institution’s actual direction never wavers.

Level Three is doing nothing, or orthogonal philanthropy, and this is underrated. There is integrity in knowing your limits. It is possible to support “vanilla” cultural projects like music and art without actively harming civilization — although, as the example of the woke orchestras and museums show, even in these areas you have to be careful these days.

Level Four is funding the right people who are already in the fight, but not necessarily getting too involved yourself. We should want most people to be here. At this level you need to have a social immune system that almost nobody around you will help you build, but you do not need to become the builder yourself.

Level Five is the hardest and highest level: building something entirely new the right way, and marshaling your own talents, reputation, judgment, network, and capital toward the creation of new institutions. New universities. New media. New policy organizations. New legal shops. New civic infrastructure. New talent pipelines into government. New technical schools. New models for health care, housing reform, public safety, and education.

Building something that can actually fight, survive, coordinate talent, withstand pressure, and keep its mission over time is much closer to company-building than to conventional philanthropy. It requires the same existential seriousness that creates great companies. The reason companies work — in fact, most of them don’t actually, but the ones that do — is that they could die. As long as someone is willing to spend, “philanthropy” cannot die, and that is precisely why it so often doesn’t work. The feedback loops that make iteration possible are almost entirely severed. A nonprofit can be wrong about everything for decades and still get the check, because the check-writer has switched into a different cognitive mode than he or she was in when the wealth was actually built.

That is why Level 5 is so rare, and also so important. For some entrepreneurs, the memory of the existential fights is enough to scare him or her into doing things that are relaxing or “fulfilling” later on, rather than a repeat of the hardest work of their lives (building companies that win). But we owe it to our posterity to fight the hard fights and bring that entrepreneurial knowledge to bear on things that really matter. There isn’t a backup country, and dysfunction has a way of spreading.

At the Cicero Institute, where I serve as chairman, we have spent nearly a decade fighting on land and in law, with teams in over twenty states. We have worked on complicated areas captured by special interests against the common good, and helped pass dozens of pieces of legislation. Groups that seem benign to most people, including doctors’ organizations, homelessness NGO service providers, licensing boards, professional associations, and government unions, get far more aggressive than most would expect once you threaten their power. They fund your opponents, capture regulators, smear you, and make your life difficult.

The University of Austin (UATX), which I co-founded and chair, is also having great early success and impact. We were lucky that many allies such as Jeff Yass and dozens of others saw the need in our civilization, and stepped up to join the endeavor. I will write more about it elsewhere; but suffice it to say, we are attracting some of the most talented students in the country, with many turning down Ivy League schools to come to UATX (tuition-free!). They are being trained as bold thinkers and fighters for our civilization and its principles, and are also already getting connected to work with top builders! There is a lot left to build at UATX — our country needs functional 21st century schools of education, journalism, law, and others. We are now well on our way; anything worth doing will be attacked and face adversity as this endeavor did at times.

My friend Charles Koch recently turned 90. Charles is a true philosopher who built one of the world’s most valuable industrial corporations, and endured decades of attacks for his political and philanthropic work. The principled, philanthropic community he founded, now called Stand Together, is a platonic ideal for what someone of his experience — and yes, age — can do to help others build bold new things to make the world more functional and prosperous. Groups like Stand Together are a key resource and inspiration as entrepreneurs become interested in how they can deploy money in service of our civilization; as one such entrepreneur, their partnership has been invaluable. They continue to inspire and partner with many more Americans building bold, functional 21st century institutions.

The summer of 2026 is shaping up to be one of the great American wealth-creation moments: SpaceX, AI, and a generation of companies built in genuinely twenty-first-century ways are minting great fortunes for individuals, and for our country. A lot of people are about to become very rich because they bet on new models, new institutions, new ways of organizing talent and risk. That wealth can be an enormous boon for the country if we get it right. But it would be an absurd civilizational tragedy if the fortunes created by new models get vacuumed up by… Harvard.

Human instinct is to work on things that are lauded rather than controversial, to find the version of engagement that gets you praised rather than attacked. We must resist this. The things worth doing almost by definition require running toward the hard problems, the ones others will not touch. The country does not need more passive benefactors laundering their consciences through obsolete institutions. It needs men and women with courage.

Civilization builders are needed. There may be no higher calling for those with the resources to answer.

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More Reading:

The Carnegie Library in Washington