This NFL Team Owner and Hedge Fund Billionaire Is Expanding His Foundation. What's Next?
/The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon. CiEll/shutterstock
Billionaire David Tepper runs a wildly successful hedge fund, owns the NFL’s Carolina Panthers and bought a $73 million Palm Beach mansion a couple years ago. But the 66-year-old and his family have only recently started ramping up their philanthropy.
The Tepper Foundation’s grantmaking more than doubled last year, hitting an all-time high of $59 million, and it ticked even higher this year. The once-barebones operation has also staffed up, and it launched a new website in October. Add to that its new portfolios on climate resilience and mental health, with more possibly to come.
“We’re finally in a moment of growth,” Randi Tepper, the foundation’s CEO and daughter of its founder, told me in a conversation in June. “We don't want to get too big too fast, so that we're being irresponsible with our giving. But we really do want… to accelerate our growth while staying pretty small and nimble.”
Tepper and his estimated $20.6 billion fortune make this grantmaking both possible and noteworthy, yet this transition has all the marks of a family project. Once known as the David A. Tepper Foundation, the philanthropy was renamed the Tepper Foundation in 2021. Randi, the sole listed employee of the operation a few years ago, took the helm this year and leads a growing staff. And as of last year, the operation’s board consists of David, Randi and David’s other two children, as well as attorney and advisor Marc Kramer.
The foundation’s endowment is also expanding, in large part due to investment gains. Between late 2018 and late 2022, the foundation’s assets gained nearly $250 million in value, hitting the billion-dollar mark. David Tepper put only $5 million into the philanthropy during that period, but added another $194 million last year, according to a spokesperson. His wealth, according to Forbes, grew by roughly $5 billion during that period.
Grantmaking has kept pace with the rising assets, hitting $65 million this fiscal year out of an endowment that now totals $1.25 billion, according to a spokesperson. That’s roughly in line with the required 5% payout rate for foundations. But its growing assets may signal the Tepper Foundation is taking a different tack than the foundations of many other ultra-rich living donors, who often use their vehicles as pass-through entities, funding them as they go.
Perhaps the most noteworthy development, however, is the recent leadership shift. For years, the foundation’s grantmaking was managed by Larry Rogers, a longtime employee of David Tepper’s hedge fund, Appaloosa Management, and the foundation’s treasurer. Randi signed on as an analyst in 2018, according to its IRS filings, and joined the board in 2020. Today, the operation has 10 employees, Randi is in charge, her siblings are on the board, and she expects the foundation will eventually have a staff of 20 to 25 people.
The family wants to keep growing the foundation’s grantmaking. “We definitely see an upward trajectory; the ceiling on that is yet to be determined,” Randi said. “My dad is looking to do more… but again, just wants to be really thoughtful about it.”
It’s a striking shift. As IP reported in a profile back in 2014, Tepper has been giving away money since well before he became known for his wealth. But until recently, that grantmaking was conducted through a pretty simple operation: few listed staff, no website, little public presence. That’s now changed. Here’s what we know so far.
A new, expansive set of portfolios
The Tepper Foundation has long been an active grantmaker for education, hunger and poverty alleviation, health and Jewish causes. My colleague Ade Adeniji put together a detailed profile of that past funding in April.
But the last couple years have led the foundation to set six priority areas, Randi said. “Before that, we were doing a lot of giving, but not necessarily with clarity of where our priorities lie.”
The foundation has put expansive labels on those portfolios: food, housing and health (with a recent focus on mental health); community impact (currently mostly encompassing funding for New Jersey and Jewish causes); pro-democracy and anti-hate initiatives (with a focus on antisemitism); crisis response and climate resilience; strengthening the nonprofit sector; and board projects.
Historically, the majority of the foundation’s grants have stayed within New Jersey, where David Tepper grew up and where the foundation is still headquartered, though he’s now based in Palm Beach. New Jersey grantmaking will continue to grow steadily, according to Randi, who lives in New York, but the foundation’s overall vision is far wider in scope. “We think that growth will really come from looking outside of New Jersey to a more national lens,” she said.
The foundation’s first climate grants have mostly come at the intersection with other portfolios, Randi said, such as grants related to disasters or food insecurity. For instance, it has backed ReFed, a nonprofit focused on food waste. It’s also granted to some of the nation’s largest environmental groups, such as the Nature Conservancy and National Wildlife Federation.
As it does for many families, mental health hits close to home for the Teppers. “Because of our own history with mental health challenges, we felt the need and the excitement around stepping up,” Randi said. A growing awareness of the mental health challenges facing the nation’s youth was another push.
The foundation’s new website offers some limited insights into how it will make its bets. The grantmaking approach and five funding criteria spelled out there echo oft-cited philanthropic goals: fill critical gaps, support strong leadership, center community voices and value diversity, equity and inclusion. The next wave of funding data from the foundation will be key to seeing how those goals actually play out. But two other elements stood out to me as immediate clues as to what will motivate its checks.
First, the foundation wants “measurable impact.” That’s not so rare, but suggests a continuation of the foundation’s history of metrics-driven grantmaking, which Adeniji explored in his profile.
Second, it wants grantees with a “clear funding model,” which make use of both public and private funds. Perhaps it should be no surprise that a hedge fund founder is hoping to back nonprofits that leverage all possible sources of funding. We’ll see if the foundation signs onto any of the ongoing efforts to make the most of the $4 trillion in anticipated federal spending over the next decade.
“I don't have any plans to go anywhere”
In many ways, David Tepper has been your typical Wall Street megadonor. He’s involved with many of the philanthropic and nonprofit groups most popular with hedge fund billionaires and other ultra-rich financiers. His daughter’s work history has put her at most of those institutions as well.
For instance, he’s on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a popular NYC nexus for philanthropically inclined Wall Streeters, where Randi once interned. The Tepper Foundation has also committed at least $50 million over five years to Blue Meridian Partners, where Randi spent time as a fellow before the pandemic and now serves as a board member. And David has previously backed Harlem Children’s Zone and Teach for America, in which Randi served.
Like other Wall Street titans, David Tepper has sent many of his biggest checks to the institutions where he was educated. He gave Carnegie Mellon University — where he got his MBA and serves on the board — $55 million in 2004 (the university renamed its business school the Tepper School of Business) and $67 million in 2013 for an innovation hub (dubbed the Tepper Quadrangle). University of Pittsburgh, where he got his B.A., has also been a recipient.
Will those universities continue to get checks? “To a certain extent, yes,” said Randi, who is a former first and third grade teacher. “In our board initiatives portfolio, Carnegie Mellon will always have a strong place.”
Her father also has a second foundation, the David and Nicole Tepper Charitable Foundation, which was established in 2020, the year after he married Nicole Bronish. As of 2021, it was a much smaller operation, with just $47 million in assets, no listed employees, and David and Nicole as the lone board members. It is run independently, with a focus on the Carolinas, according to a spokesperson. (There are, incidentally, foundations established by unrelated Tepper families in both New York and Colorado.)
Meanwhile, at the larger Tepper Foundation, Randi is clear that she hopes to be around for a “long time.” “I don't have any plans to go anywhere anytime soon,” she said. Not many billion-dollar foundations have a 30-something at the reins, but it’s not unheard of. To take a much more prominent example, Alex Soros recently took over as chair of the board at the Open Society Foundations.
Is she ready to be CEO? Randi says she’s relied on “great mentors” and the staff around her. “I’m really proud of our team,” said the 34-year-old. “And excited about continuing to add to it and build it and supplement where I may not have all the skill sets, but to ensure that our foundation has what it needs to be successful.”
What’s still unclear, though, is exactly how much money she’ll be working with. David, like many who have made their billions on Wall Street, has not signed the Giving Pledge. Randi said her dad still does not have a set plan for what will happen with his fortune when he’s gone.
“It’s something we’re in very active conversations about,” she said. “We're just trying to, again, be thoughtful about it, not do anything too quickly and be irresponsible about how we give. But a lot more philanthropy to come.”