George Soros has reportedly transferred $18 billion from his personal fortune to the Open Society Foundations, making the non-profit one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world.
The Wall Street Journal estimates Soros’s net worth at $23 billion.
Soros, who lived through the Nazi occupation in his native Hungary, later fled communist rule in the country and eventually immigrated to the United States. He has become a leading backer of liberal causes and candidates, including Hillary Clinton.
Soros established his first foundation in 1984 in Hungary, and he founded the Open Society Foundations in the U.S. in 1993. Soros has spent nearly $14 billion funding a host of programs around the world, including refugee relief and public health efforts.
The foundation said it is the second-largest in the world after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Open Society’s 2017 budget is $941 million, with giving organized around seven global regions and 10 themes, including early childhood and education, human rights movements and institutions, and justice reform and the rule of law.
But the foundation has been the subject of controversy for its work in the United States, such as supporting Planned Parenthood and criminal justice issues also advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 2014, the foundation contributed $1.4 million to help pass California’s Proposition 47, which reduced drug possession and minor theft charges to misdemeanors. Soros provided other funding less directly.
Most of Open Society’s donations go to non-political causes overseas. But some of the groups who are either directly funded by Soros or received seed money to get started promote his one-world government agenda.
His political contributions, while extensive, are hugely magnified because of his influence with other billionaire donors to the Democratic Party. Suffice it to say, infusing his foundation with that much cash will free up other resources for partisan campaign donations.
At age 87, Soros knows that the end is a lot closer than the beginning. You can be sure that any successor at the Open Society Foundations will have pretty much the same ideological bent and similar ideas about how to spend that cash.
