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We Found The Invisible Billionaire Family That Controls America

The Koch Brothers Are Way Sicker Than We Thought

Jul 14, 2026

Charles and his brother David are some of the wealthiest people alive. Worth over 70 billion dollars and 50 billion dollars respectively. But just money, by itself, was never the destination. It was simply a tool. A means of building something much bigger than a business. Because if you genuinely believed, as Charles Koch did, that America was drifting in the wrong direction, buying a few politicians every election cycle was never going to be enough. Charles Koch wanted something more permanent. He wanted to build an entire system that could outlast all of them. And this is where the story of America's dark money empire really begins.

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UNCF/Koch Scholars are entrepreneurs first. They love to innovate, challenge themselves and others, and find better ways to remove barriers to opportunity and help people improve their lives.

Started in 2014 with a generous $25 million grant from Koch Industries, Inc., and the Charles Koch Foundation, the UNCF/Koch Scholars Program offers scholarships, mentorship, academic and professional support and networking opportunities to talented undergraduate African American students. Students may come from a variety of backgrounds, but they will share an interest in exploring how entrepreneurship can improve well-being for individuals, communities and society as a whole.

VERY GOOD BIG PICT SUM 2021 CMD

charles Koch’s “Uniter” Rebrand Strains Credulity After Funding Congressional Coup Supporter

By Alex Kotch

|

February 11th, 2021

ALEC, Climate, Democracy, Featured Investigations, Koch, News, Opinion, Trump

At 85, the most influential Republican political donor in modern U.S. history says he has some regrets. According to soft-ball corporate media interviews and a new book he’s written, billionaire industrialist Charles Koch wishes that his more than five decades of organizing and funding far-right, partisan politicians, advocacy groups, and academia had slightly less partisan results.

Koch’s latest media makeover strains credulity. The man spent his entire adult life, while helming one of the largest and dirtiest private companies in the nation, working to fundamentally alter society and move it towards his ideal: a libertarian utopia with low taxes, no unions, weak regulations, and unlimited corporate political spending.

Most recently, numerous House and Senate Republicans that he, his family, his company, and his political machine helped elect attempted to overturn the election just hours after hordes of Trump supporters mounted a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Koch’s efforts have had a tremendous impact on the country. His massive grants to ideological, free-market university programs have created a body of right-wing economics literature. His political advocacy groups have grown into a network as large as either major political party. The hundreds of state lawmakers he helped elect have gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts with partisan and racial bias, making legislatures and U.S. House delegations far more conservative than the states they represent. Elected officials and agency heads he has supported have cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy and struck down environmental regulations.

The sum of these many parts is a major, industrialized nation wedded to fossil fuels, without universal health care, and with lower taxes than most comparable countries, where Republicans govern the majority of its states, and right-wing ideologues occupy scores of powerful court seats.

Boosting Extremist Politicians

Koch’s success thus far still isn’t enough for him. As he perfected the pages of his latest book, trying to cast himself as a unifier and good-hearted philanthropist, his political operation poured tens of millions of dollars into election ads and canvassing operations for mostly Republican candidates. Many of those candidates would win their races and proceed to challenge the valid election of Joe Biden.

A recent CMD report found that Koch Industries was the biggest corporate donor to super PACs and other outside groups that spent money to help elect many of the 147 House and Senate Republicans who voted to overturn the election and disenfranchise millions of voters. In just these members’ most recent election cycles, Koch Industries donated nearly $14 million to those groups. Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and its affiliated super PAC spent close to $18 million on ads and other means to help elect a number of members who attempted the legislative coup.

Koch Industries’ PAC also chipped in, making six-figure contributions to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which spent to boost the election deniers in Congress. Charles Koch and five of his close family members each gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the NRSC.

As OpenSecrets found, Koch PAC was also the biggest direct donor to the campaigns of the election-denying members of Congress, having contributed over $930,000.

And, to make sure Republicans retained their Senate majority under Mitch McConnell, Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Action (AFPA) spent millions on one of the two Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoff elections. AFPA spent at least $13.9 million on mailers, digital ads, door hangers, and canvassing in favor of incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue or opposing his challenger, Democrat John Ossoff. Perdue campaigned on the “Big Lie” of rampant voter fraud and encouraged other senators to vote against the election results, saying he would do the same if he was eligible to do so.

Part of the Koch election effort was run by the Libre Initiative, a project of Americans for Prosperity that has courted Hispanic voters for nearly a decade, which went “all-in on the Georgia runoffs,” according to The New York Times.

Along with AFPA, Libre Action spent considerable resources on canvassing, knocking on doors for vulnerable GOP incumbent Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina for nearly a year; Tillis won re-election. Tillis did not vote against the election results but, along with many of his Republican colleagues, supported Trump’s legal challenges and recount requests and expressed unfounded concern over the security of mail-in ballots.

As in 2016, the Koch political groups did not directly campaign for Trump, but its work for GOP senators helped him. “The turnout we do for Tillis is helpful to the president indirectly, because we’re turning out conservatives who are aligned,” said Libre Initiative Executive Director.

According to a Nov. 11 CMD analysis, 82 percent of state and federal candidates whom the Koch network backed in 2020 won their elections. Of the 439 candidates in whom the Koch network invested, only 19, or 4.3 percent, were Democrats. The network supported 19 U.S. Senate candidates, all Republicans, and 15 won.

Candidates the network has supported in recent elections include Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), the two election denial ringleaders in the Senate, and extremist representatives such as Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ), both Freedom Caucus members who voted against the election results and allegedly helped plan the Jan. 6 events with lead organizer Ali Alexander.

Funding Division

Koch’s new persona is that of a man who seeks to “build bridges” between political partisans in a deeply divided country. His record, up to this very moment, is that of a man who has fueled that divide by bankrolling hyper-partisan operations, think tanks, and media companies that spread disinformation and back radical right-wing policies.

At the structural level, Koch has long funded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play network of Republican state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists that writes model bills that boost business profits. Over the years, ALEC has carried the oil industry’s water on climate denial and anti-environmental legislation, and promoted highly controversial “stand your ground,” anti-labor, deregulation, school privatization, and voter suppression bills.

ALEC President Lisa Nelson told a Center for National Policy crowd last year that her group drafted letters that lawmakers could send to their secretaries of state to cast doubt on their states’ election results, implying that this would be a way for them to overturn their constituents’ votes and instead pick pro-Trump Electoral College electors. ALEC members in the Pennsylvania state legislature went on to lead an effort to overturn their state’s electors, and numerous individuals associated with ALEC have ties to the events on Jan. 6 or to the “Big Lie” of voter fraud that fueled the insurrection.

Koch is also a major funder of ALEC ally the State Policy Network and its numerous members, which are right-wing think tanks that promote free-market, anti-labor, and pro-business policies, fight legal battles in favor of conservative ideals, and often have ties to Republican state lawmakers. One member, the Mackinac Center, promoted the “Operation Gridlock” anti-coronavirus restriction protest in Michigan where white militia members, who would later plot to kidnap and execute Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, recruited followers.

Several Koch-backed groups have been lying about voter fraud for years in a coordinated effort to lay the groundwork for voting restrictions that disproportionately disenfranchise Democratic voters. Some have advocated for purging huge numbers of voters from the rolls.

At the Heritage Foundation, which has received roughly $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2014, voter suppression advocate Hans von Spakovsky manages its Election Law Reform Initiative. Spakovsky recently argued that mail-in voting is ripe for fraud and has promoted the “voter-fraud myth” for many years. He was a member of Trump’s failed “election integrity” commission, which found no evidence of voter fraud in the 2016 elections.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which got roughly $4.9 million from the Charles Koch Foundation from 2014 to 2019, attacked mail-in voting this year as the pandemic raged, a tactic adopted by many conservative groups aimed to boost Republican candidates.

Ties to Far-Right Extremism

Several organizations that Koch funds have hired or promoted far-right extremists.

The Leadership Institute, a State Policy Network member that counts Koch as a donor and chairman emeritus, trains young conservatives and publishes Campus Reform, a website that attacks liberal university students, professors, and administrations as well as affirmative action and other policies it claims are illegitimate. Multiple Leadership Institute alumni went on to reveal themselves as overt white nationalists.

ALEC has a history of failing to denounce extremists in its ranks, including former Washington state chair Matt Shea. Even after Shea was accused of white supremacist domestic terrorism, ALEC never publicly denounced him nor cut ties with him.

The Heritage Foundation had Andy Ngo, a prominent propagandist for fascists, give a keynote speech about antifascists in 2019.

Koch may be walking back a small fraction of that funding for divisive groups. The Charles Koch Foundation’s 2019 tax return, obtained by CMD, shows that it did not fund The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), which finances much of the reporting that appears on the website of The Daily Caller, an extremely partisan website founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that often publishes dubious, Republican-friendly stories and has a history of employing white nationalists.

While Koch didn’t fund DCNF in 2019, his foundations provided 84 percent of the nonprofit’s annual revenue in 2016 and nearly 40 percent in 2017, giving close to $1 million in each of those years. In 2018, Koch’s largest media investment, nearly $750,000, went to DCNF.

Bankrolling Climate Change Denial

As the leader of an oil and gas empire, Koch has financed a vast climate change denial network for decades. According to Greenpeace, Koch family foundations poured over $145 million into 90 groups that have attacked climate science and policy from 1997 to 2018.

Pressure from Koch’s network on politicians and academics helped politicize climate science and radicalize Republicans on the issue. The result is a deeply divided America, where 72 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic believe that “human activity contributes a great deal to climate change,” while only 22 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners agree with this factual statement, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center poll.

Broader Network Even More Toxic

In addition to the outfits he directly funds, Koch has been a prominent funder of DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, two connected charity vehicles that direct wealthy conservatives’ donations to the nonprofits of their choosing while hiding the donors’ identities from the public. The two funds, especially DonorsTrust in recent years, have bankrolled far-right, hyperpartisan organizations, even explicitly white nationalist hate groups.

A recent Center for Media and Democracy investigation revealed that DonorsTrust gave over $1.5 million to the white nationalist hate group VDARE in 2019, along with a smaller donation to the white nationalist hate group behind the American Renaissance publication.

Project Veritas, the frequently discredited sting operation led by James O’Keefe, gets significant funding from DonorsTrust. From 2014 to 2019, DonorsTrust gave $12.5 million to the group, representing a sizable portion of its revenue. During that time, Project Veritas worked with ex-spies recruited by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who is the brother of Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, to infiltrate and smear liberal groups. Most recently, Project Veritas worked with a postal worker and promoted his false statements about alleged ballot-related malfeasance within the USPS and allegedly attempted to bribe a Minnesota man to falsely claim he was “harvesting” ballots for Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar. The group has “a cozy relationship” with the self-described “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys, a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Far-right student group Turning Point USA, which has a history of hiring racists, is also a big beneficiary of DonorsTrust contributions, receiving over $1.5 million from the charity from 2017 to 2019.

DonorsTrust also finances discriminatory organizations and groups considered hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to a CMD report, DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund combined to give over $13 million to anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ organizations from 2014 to 2018, including anti-Muslim hate group the Center for Security Policy and the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom.

The Middle East Media and Research Institute, an organization at the “inner core” of the nation’s Islamophobia network that “attempts to portray Muslims and Arabs as being inherently irrational and violent,” received over $600,000 from DonorsTrust from 2015 to 2019.

Other extreme groups that DonorsTrust has kept afloat include the alt-right-friendly Center for American Greatness and the Prager University Foundation, the nonprofit being online disinformation publisher PragerU, which produces online videos denying climate change, claiming that white privilege does not exist, and spreading white nationalist tropes.

DonorsTrust also bankrolls numerous voter suppression groups, including the Public Interest Legal Foundation ($600,000 since 2016), True the Vote ($150,000 from 2013 to 2017), the Judicial Education Project ($47.5 million from 2011 to 2018), and Judicial Watch ($218,000 since 2010).

About Alex Kotch

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Republican’s Socialism Takedown Backfires Big Time

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Koch-Controlled Organizations Spent More Than $1.1 Billion During the 2020 Election Cycle

Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) series,Part 1 of 4!

Connor Gibson

Sep 7

I recently wrote a four-part barrage of articles on Charles Koch’s advocacy network for the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). I’m crossposting them here, with CMD’s permission: see part 2.

Part 1: Koch-Controlled Organizations Spent More Than $1.1 Billion During the 2020 Election Cycle

In the 2020 election cycle, 28 organizations controlled by Charles Koch, his family, and Koch Industries executives spent a combined $1.1 billion, primarily to influence public policy and politics in the U.S., and had net revenues of $2.7 billion.

By the end of 2020, the combined assets of these nonprofits totaled $2.8 billion, an increase of $1.5 billion from the beginning of the year.

Other comparably large conservative financiers such as the Bradley, Scaife and Searle foundations show significantly less in net revenue, expenditures, and assets.

Click image to open the interactive table!

These latest figures eclipse the political spending disclosed by Koch Industries, the company that serves as the engine for all Koch-controlled nonprofits. In comparison, Koch Industries spent only $22.4 million on federal lobbying and campaign contributions in the 2020 election cycle.

But Charles Koch's organizations regularly spend over half a billion dollars annually, with a total of $607.9 million in expenses in 2019, and $638.6 million in 2020.

In 2020 alone, Koch-controlled organizations raised over $2.2 billion dollars—more than four times what they collectively raised the previous year. Before 2020, the combined revenue of Koch-controlled nonprofit organizations never reached the $1-billion threshold, with $501.1 million in net revenue in 2019, and approximately $650 million in 2018.

In order to avoid any double-counting, these net revenue and net expense totals account for all grants and expenses exchanged between Koch-controlled organizations. Those payments can be viewed here:

Click image to open interactive table! p 1 of 4

[Table with 8 columns and 31 rows. Currently displaying rows 1 to 10.

Organization 2019 Assets (Year end) 2019 Revenue 2019 Expenses 2020 Assets (Year end) 2020 Revenue 2020 Expenses

Gross Totals: $1,371,314,385 $603,323,140 $617,426,384 $2,867,220,278 $2,298,903,361 $696,199,389

Net Totals: $1,370,364,385 $501,591,400 $515,694,644 $2,867,220,278 $2,209,877,666 $594,467,649

Stand Together Chamber of Commerce $93,530,806 $192,395,520 $161,224,109 $115,161,980 $204,330,493 $170,671,786

Stand Together Trust

(The Seminar Network, Inc) $85,284,335 $23,531,841 $45,591,475 $136,514,195 $104,032,743 $41,111,947

The Seminar Network Institute $3,227,419 $10,421,154 $8,293,690 $188,577 $52 $2,370,232

Capitol Leaders, Inc $192,085 $27,794 $132,765 $104,361 $165 $42,910

Americans for Prosperity Foundation $10,902,851 $19,116,684 $16,069,008 $11,876,629 $12,068,022 $7,252,643

Americans for Prosperity $21,955,158 $54,497,443 $56,999,314 $15,693,509 $64,546,338 $78,329,056

Charles Koch Institute $385,547,571 $20,830,118 $14,868,783 $364,176,510 $9,154,321 $54,614,401 ]

p2

p3

These calculations likely fail to account for the total policy and political spending overseen by Charles Koch since Koch Industries and a fleet of Koch-controlled limited liability companies (LLCs) do not disclose similar finances. In rare instances of disclosure, Koch Industries and members of the Koch family have been known to invest millions more in policy-influencing organizations.

Charles Koch's Return on Political Investments

Despite waning news coverage, Charles Koch’s donor network remains unique in terms of its size and its top-down control by executives of a single company.

Unlike large donor-advised funds that finance a wide array of charities and nonpolitical causes, the bulk of Koch's "Stand Together" cluster of groups has coordinated around election and policy priorities.

Charles Koch's political fleet played a significant role in steering the policy priorities of the Trump administration, due in part to its influence in staffing the former president's cabinet.Even though Koch told reporters he was so displeased with Trump that he might even support Democrats—a rhetorical trick he pulls every few years—the tens of millions of dollars his organizations invested in U.S. Senate and House races went almost exclusively to Republicans.

In addition to showing obvious partisan preferences, Koch has financed groups involved in extremist activity, including the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In 2022, Koch Industries is still financing many politicians who worked to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election, despite signaling to Politico that it would discontinue such support.

This political spending continues to pay off during the Biden presidency. Last year Koch exploited the Democrats' weak majority by undermining the comprehensive climate and infrastructure legislative package known as Build Back Better. The Koch machine also spent heavily to tank the voting and election reform policy known as the For the People Act, despite knowing full well that doing so went against popular sentiment across the political spectrum. 

Each of these counterattacks fed into another major priority for Koch: installing radical judges to the U.S. Supreme Court who are willing to do the bidding of the wealthiest people and corporations in the country. His astroturf organization Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent "seven figures" on efforts to support the confirmations of Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett—for a total price tag of between $3 and $10 million. 

This corporate-captured Supreme Court is already delivering victories to the Koch network. The Court supported an attack on IRS donor disclosure rules advanced by the AFP Foundation—the sister group of the organization that supported the confirmations of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett. Most recently, at the behest of a number of Koch-controlled or Koch-funded organizations and attorneys general, the Court struck down key aspects of the Environmental Protection Agency's climate change mitigation regulations.

The next two articles in this series will explore more about the rapid growth and evolution of Charles Koch's powerful political machine.

another table

1 of 7

Total: $190,757,435

Stand Together Chamber of Commerce 2019 $40,000,000 Americans for Prosperity

Stand Together Chamber of Commerce 2019 $4,000,000 TSN Institute

Stand Together Chamber of Commerce 2019 $2,000,000 Yes Every Kid

The Seminar Network, Inc (Stand Together Trust) 2019 $12,775,573 Americans for Prosperity Foundation

The Seminar Network, Inc (Stand Together Trust) 2019 $350,000 Bill of Rights Institute

The Seminar Network, Inc (Stand Together Trust) 2019 $4,000,000 Cause of Action Institute

The Seminar Network, Inc (Stand Together Trust) 2019 $3,455,500 Stand Together Foundation

The Seminar Network, Inc (Stand Together Trust) 2019 $1,570,000 Youth Entrepreneurs

The Seminar Network, Inc (Stand Together Trust) 2019 $850,000 Charles Koch Foundation ]

Methodology notes:

The figures reported here are drawn from the financials of 25 nonprofits regulated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and three super PACs regulated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Our calculations include money raised and spent by three Koch-controlled super PACs: AFP Action, Stand Together PAC, and Freedom Partners Action Fund, even though two of these (Stand Together PAC and Freedom Partners Action Fund) have been terminated. Asset totals for these FEC-regulated organizations were sourced from each super PAC’s reported cash on hand at the end of each year, based on year-end reports or termination reports filed with the FEC.

For the purposes of this article, "Koch-controlled" specifically means organizations under direct operational control of Charles Koch, his family members, or his fellow executives at Koch Industries. Most of these groups were founded by the Koch family.

Noteworthy groups heavily financed by Koch Industries or governed in part by Koch executives were excluded if they are not operated at the ultimate discretion of Charles Koch, his family, or his company. Among the many groups excluded are the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Cato Institute, the Kansas Policy Institute, the Independent Women's Forum, and the American Institute for Economic Research.

Our calculations exclude numerous Koch-controlled LLCs that are part of the network's overall political operations, such as i360 and Stand Together Communications (formerly, In Pursuit Of). Many expenditures to these LLCs are disclosed in the IRS 990 filings of Koch-controlled organizations and super PACs, but given that the revenue and expenditures of the LLCs themselves are undisclosed, those figures have been excluded.

While most of these organizations exist primarily to influence matters of policy or politics, groups such as the Koch Cultural Trust and others are involved in philanthropic activity. Some spending by the Koch Family Foundation (formerly known as the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation) relates to student scholarships for dependents of Koch company employees. The Stand Together Foundation finances many charities that are not inherently political, but are generally tied to Koch's ideology of limited government and unregulated markets. The Stand Together Foundation was born out of a crisis communications push following Koch’s poor public relations in the 2010s, a topic that will be examined in part three of this series.

connor g emil CMD

pt 1 https://substack.com/redirect/4dc75e64-2da4-4533-a381-7a9ba81848d5?r=1n6e6

...a previously unreported 501(c)(4) “social welfare” political nonprofit called CCKC4 received a giant cash injection of $1.2 billion in 2020, making it a potentially formidable political player.

CCKC4 is controlled by Charles Koch’s son, Chase Koch. Chase Koch is the president of Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), the venture capital subsidiary of Koch Industries.

The cash transfer increased CCKC4’s assets from $37 million in 2019 to $1.3 billion at the close of 2020, significantly exceeding the value of the other largest Koch-controlled nonprofits like the Charles Koch Foundation ($462 million) and Charles Koch Institute ($364 million).

The $1.2 billion received by CCKC4 represents over half of the $2.7 billion in combined net revenue received by 28 Koch-controlled nonprofit organizations from 2019-2020. Most of the organization’s massive cash injection appears to have been invested as a basis for the organization’s endowment.

CCKC4 presumably stands for “Charles Chase Koch 501(c)(4).” It has no website nor public presence. CCKC4 filed IRS 990s in 2018 and 2019, and received its determination letter confirming its tax-exempt status in May of 2020.

The group lists its purpose simply as “grant-making,” but it has only made two grants since coming into existence. In 2019, CCKC4 gave $10 million to the Charles Koch Foundation, of which Chase is a board member.

Unlike the majority of Koch-controlled 501(c)(3) nonprofits that cannot primarily engage in political activity, CCKC4 is a dark money 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization that can legally funnel up to half of its spending into political races. This indicates Chase Koch’s continued interest in political influence, contradicting his public relations push as he took on a prominent role at Koch Industries.

The group’s IRS tax filings list the $1.2 billion infusion as unspecified payments from individuals, $953 million of which was in the form of stock and other securities.

“The $1.2 billion funding of CCKC4 makes it one of the largest section 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and a potential major player in political and policy circles,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer in an email to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Mayer is a law professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

The scale of the organization is unusual for a 501(c)(4) organization, but not unprecedented. Professor Mayer compared the organization’s sizable assets to $3.4 billion reported by Fund for Policy Reform in 2019. The Fund is one of many organizations linked to the liberal political financier George Soros.

“The decision by the Koch family and these other billionaires to fund 501(c)(4)s at this level demonstrates the important role that 501(c)(4)s serve as philanthropic and policy vehicles that are not subject to the limits on political activity faced by 501(c)(3) charities,” said Mayer, whose research expertise relates to politically active nonprofit organizations.

“It also demonstrates the importance of an obscure tax law change in 2015 that exempted gifts to 501(c)(4)s from the federal gift tax. Before that statutory change, it was uncertain whether the gift tax applied to such gifts,” Mayer said. “Gifts that exceed the annual gift tax exclusion ($16,000 per recipient as of 2022) generally count toward the exemption amount, and most very wealthy individuals use up the lifetime exemption through gifts to their children and other family members.”

CMD contacted a Koch Industries executive who serves as director of several Koch-controlled nonprofits for comment, but received no response.

CCKC4 routed $125 million to a Koch-owned LLC

IRS disclosures show that Chase Koch’s nonprofit circulates substantial amounts of dark money between limited liability companies (LLC) controlled by the Koch family.

CCKC4 paid $125 million to the Non-Profit 1888 Feeder Fund, LLC in 2020.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings indicate the Non-Profit 1888 Feeder-Fund has gross assets exceeding $2.1 billion as of May 2022. It is an asset allocation fund that manages diversified portfolios of investments, registered to operate in the states of Colorado, Delaware, and Kansas.

Professor Mayer noted the possibility that the $125 million sent from CCKC4 to the Nonprofit 1888 Feeder Fund could reflect the value of a specific investment the LLC is managing for CCKC4. “It is common for large investors to make their investments through LLCs that pool funds from multiple investors,” Mayer said.

The Non-Profit 1888 Feeder-Fund is one of several subsidiaries of 1888 Investments, LLC, which reported several key facts in recent SEC filings:

• It manages over $16.5 billion in assets for 60 clients.
• Its clients include 41 “high net wealth individuals.” It is unclear if these wealthy individuals include donors to Charles Koch’s political network.
• Its clients include 13 nonprofits, which are not specified. It’s unclear if these are only Koch family trusts, or if they include Koch’s politically oriented organizations like the Stand Together Chamber of Commerce or Americans for Prosperity. 
• It has 11 employees. Its employees and board overlap significantly with Koch Industries.
• Its most recent SEC investment disclosures show a total of $78.3 million invested in four publicly traded companies. $72 million of that total is invested in Blue Owl Capital.

Both 1888 Investments and the Non-Profit 1888 Feeder-Fund are subsidiaries of 1888 Management Fund.

1888 is the year that Charles Koch’s grandfather, Harry Koch, immigrated to the United States.Bloomberg was first to report on the company in 2016:

With little fanfare, the Kochs are building an operation called 1888 Management LLC to manage part of their personal wealth. Initially tucked inside the private Koch Industries Inc.,1888 has been quietly scouting for personal investments for the Kochs, whose money and influence have helped shape the modern conservative movement in the U.S.

The ultimate size of the parent LLC, 1888 Management, is unclear. Bloomberg reported that someone familiar with 1888 Management claimed it was managing over $2 billion in investments.

CCKC4 received $30 million from another Koch-controlled LLC, EFPRP Investments, LLC. The purpose of this transaction is not clear, and little public information exists regarding EFPRP Investments.

The arrangement between nonprofits and LLC’s allows donors to skirt nonprofit disclosure laws and spend more dark money on political causes, both domestic and international. The Koch-funded Philanthropy Roundtable advocates this strategy:

LLCs are not subject to annual distribution requirements; they give donors the latitude to invest in domestic and foreign for-profit ventures; they can be used to fund ballot initiatives, direct lobbying, political campaigns, and individual candidates; and they can be used to support foreign charities without the requirement imposed on private foundations to determine that prospective foreign grantees are the equivalents of Section 501c3 public charities.

The next article in this series will examine one large grant that CCKC4 made to an independent donor advised fund, which the Koch network appears to be using to further obscure its spending.