Will Alex Soros make OSF 'more political'?

Not much is known about Alexander Soros, the son of billionaire philanthropist and financier George Soros, as he takes the reins from his father as chair of the Open Society Foundations, or OSF. George, meanwhile, is very much a public figure. The 92-year-old Hungarian American billionaire is celebrated and maligned in almost equal measure for his brand of pro-democracy philanthropy around the world. His 37-year-old son, on the other hand, first came to the world’s attention largely because of his reputation as a New York City socialite in the late 2000s. Now older and more established in the philanthropy world, Alex is set to help run one of the biggest philanthropic organizations in the world and has claimed to be “more political” than his father. Alex took over as chair of the New York-based OSF late last year and will now also oversee the $25 billion Soros Fund Management, a former hedge fund turned family office that supports the foundation and the Soros family, The Wall Street Journal was first to report. Mark Malloch-Brown remains the foundation’s president. Alex is the oldest of two sons from George’s second marriage and is already a familiar face at the foundation. A millennial with a deep interest in history and social justice, Alex previously served as deputy chair of OSF and stood in for his father on visits to the organization's offices around the world. The elder Soros said he trusts his son to manage the foundation, which currently has a $22 billion endowment and distributed about $1.5 billion to groups promoting human rights and democracy in 2021. “He’s earned it,” George Soros told WSJ. An OSF spokesperson confirmed the succession plan to Devex. The younger Soros’ appointment isn’t hugely remarkable given that leadership roles at family foundations tend to be transferred to family members. However, the change comes at a pivotal moment for the more than 30-year-old organization. Alexander will face challenges both internal and external as OSF restructures itself to address rising authoritarianism and global crises. Philanthropy experts say they are watching to see how he will shape that ongoing revamp. Alex made his “more political” claim specifically in regard to domestic U.S. politics — which is striking given his father’s lengthy history of supporting liberal candidates and causes both in the U.S. and abroad. And it’s not yet clear how Alex’s personal politics might shape his work at the foundation at a politically tense time externally. Alex has previously expressed ambivalence about modern philanthropy and especially the way that wealthy people are praised for their giving. “I am also not interested in being known as a philanthropist, being part of the philanthropy industry,” he said in an interview for the 2017 book “Generation Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving.” At the time he was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley and head of the Alexander Soros Foundation, which he set up in 2012 to promote social justice and human rights. “We now live in an age of governance and procedure, but that’s all very new. If there is a right way to have a foundation, I’m agnostic toward it,” he added. The keys to the empire The younger Soros has already begun putting his stamp on OSF. Over the past two years, OSF has been consolidating programs and streamlining operations to allow for quicker action on priority issues, such as climate change. Alex has been deeply involved in the restructuring, according to Merrill Sovner, who previously worked on civil society programs for OSF. “I’ve heard from friends and former colleagues that Alex has been involved for some time on the board. And the recent changes and the turnover of staff were all directed by the board,” said Sovner, who worked there from 2001-2013. Already, OSF has reduced staff size by about 20% since announcing the reorganization in 2021. It also has downsized to 12 offices and 11 national foundations, a big drop from the 22 regional and national foundations and 44 offices it had before the start of its “fundamental transformation.” The board is slated to consider additional changes at a meeting this month, sources within OSF tell Devex. In many ways, the reorganization seems to signal the end of an era for OSF, said Amir Pasic, dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. A prominent domestic and international grantmaker since the end of the Cold War, OSF now appears to be responding to the “unprecedented” shifting political environment in the U.S. and globally, including rising populism and authoritarianism, Pasic said. This succession plan is just the latest signal that OSF is planning for the next stage “with a steady hand from the older generation,” he said. It might be one of the last big appointments that the elder Soros makes, Pasic added. “He’s transferring the keys, so to speak, to the empire. Not just hiring somebody from outside.” Alex graduated from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in history in 2018, so there is “that maintaining of an intellectual leader,” Pasic said. George is widely regarded as a public intellectual with big ideas on foreign policy and relations. George was known as a very hands-on leader in the early days of OSF but gradually backed away from the day-to-day operations. The board has been OSF’s primary decision-making force since the early 2000s, Sovner said. So, in many ways this transition doesn’t mark “a big change,” said Sovner, who is now assistant director at the City University of New York’s European Union Studies Center. Among the changes Alex has been credited with is increasing OSF’s annual spending in Latin America to $60 million from $12 million. Alex also has said that he wants to focus on domestic U.S. politics and specifically hot-button issues such as voting and abortion rights and gender equality. So far, he hasn’t specified how his approach to these issues — many of which George Soros also has addressed through his philanthropy and political donations — might differ from his father’s. In addition to his philanthropy, George Soros is a top political donor for the U.S. Democratic Party. In 2019, he created a political action committee that raised more than $81 million during the 2019-2020 U.S. election cycle. He has often been the target of criticism from conservative politicians, many of whom see him as a left-wing “boogeyman.” When Alex spoke of being more political, he was “speaking of his personal capacity regarding politics in the U.S.” and “did not mean that the foundation would now take a political course,” an OSF spokesperson later clarified to Devex. “Open Society will remain committed to democracy, human rights, climate justice, and addressing inequality,” the spokesperson told Devex, adding that the issues that he highlighted also “have long been priorities for the Open Society Foundations.” How OSF began Whether he comes to be seen as more or less political than his father, the younger Soros has made it clear in interviews that his ultimate goals align with those of the elder Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has used his wealth to promote human rights and democracy. Over his lifetime, the former hedge fund owner has amassed an estimated $7.1 billion in personal wealth. He launched the initiative that would eventually become OSF in 1979 with the goal of advocating for the creation of open societies that allow citizens individual freedoms. He started his philanthropic work by funding scholarships for students in Apartheid South Africa and political dissidents in communist Eastern Europe. OSF now operates in six regions: Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the U.S. The work has become more challenging as more countries have started to turn away from democracy, Soros has said. “When I got involved in what I call political philanthropy some 40 years ago, the open society idea was on the ascendance,” he told NPR in a 2019 interview. “Closed societies are opening up, and now open societies are on the defensive. And dictatorships are on the rise.” When asked in that interview if he thought that his pro-democracy approach to philanthropy had failed, he said, “Well, I have to admit that the tide has turned against me. But I don't think that I have failed because I stand for the principles that I believed then and I continue to believe now, which is the open society.” New leadership The younger Soros also seems committed to those principles. In addition to OSF, he sits on several other boards, including the Center for Jewish History, Central European University, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Crisis Group. He made his first major philanthropic contribution more than a decade ago in the form of a $250,000 gift to Jewish Funds for Justice, a New-York based social and economic justice organization. He has spoken of wanting to honor his parents through his philanthropic work. In the “Generation Impact” interview, Soros spoke of his father’s legacy of advocating for the “stateless,” as the Soros family and many other European Jews became refugees during the Holocaust. He also talked about how his mother, Susan Weber, taught him to be “philanthropic, civic-minded, politically involved, and accomplished in my own right.” “And I look at donations, whether foundation grants or political donations, as instruments for the type of change I seek to make or commitments to the convictions I have,” he said in the book. He also spoke of wanting to give to both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) charitable organizations. Under U.S. law, a 501(c)(3) organization is restricted in how much it can engage in political or lobbying activities, while a 501(c)(4) is allowed to make unlimited political contributions. Donations to the former are tax-deductible as charitable contributions. Donations to the latter are not. “I worry that, throughout history, trying to avoid politics has often been a predicate for totalitarianism,” Alex Soros said. “I won’t get a tax deduction if I give to a 501(c)(4) political organization, but the consequences of a lot of people not being willing to support political change has, from my own study of history, not been good.” “As it is, I believe foundations and philanthropists get too much credit for their giving, which ultimately is a gift they are allowed from the [U.S. Internal Revenue Service],” he added. Alex’s views on using philanthropy as a vehicle for social change align with those of many others from the millennial generation — those born roughly between 1981 and 1996 — according to Michael Moody, co-author of Generation Impact. Younger donors tend to be more focused on pushing systemic changes than baby boomers, those born roughly between 1946 and 1964, and earlier generations of philanthropists, said Moody, who researches family philanthropy and philanthropic trends. “What I interpreted when he said ‘I’m more political’ is not ‘I’m going to focus on giving to candidates even more than my dad,” Moody said. “I think he’s talking about all sorts of ways that you can engage as a significant philanthropist and social investor to try to create policy change and to advocate for political systems that improve civic engagement and make civil society better — all of the things required for an open society.”