In Part II, we followed the money out of the machine — to the architect’s own LLC. In Part III, we follow it in. Before Melissa Moss could be paid, someone had to fund the thing she built. The deepest pocket we can document belongs to a man worth more than ten billion dollars — and to understand him you have to understand a set of entirely legal financial structures whose ordinary function, across the political spectrum, is to put distance between a donor and the causes their money reaches.
There is a reason you have heard of George Soros and not of Pierre Omidyar. The difference is not scale. It is strategy — and the strategy is the entire point.
In the rough mechanics of it, they are the same kind of figure: a billionaire who directs a fortune into a vast web of political and “civil society” organizations on the American left. But Soros funds the way a man who does not much care who knows funds — his name is on the foundation, the building, the controversy. Omidyar funds the way a man who has thought very carefully about not being the story funds. In a series about an apparatus engineered to keep its own structure out of view, the quieter billionaire is the one worth understanding — not because his giving is illegal, but because he has mastered, more completely than almost anyone, the legal architecture of arriving everywhere while appearing nowhere.
Pierre Omidyar founded eBay in 1995 and was a billionaire within a few years of its 1998 public offering. Estimates of his fortune vary widely by method — Forbes and Bloomberg have placed it anywhere from roughly $9 billion to the high teens of billions, with most 2026 estimates above $11 billion — the spread itself a function of how much of his wealth has been moved into trusts and foundations and out of public view. He lives in Honolulu; he signed the Giving Pledge alongside Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. By the measure of public reputation he is a philanthropist — humanitarian aid, global development, press freedom.
By the measure of money moved into American political and civic organizations, he is also one of the most prolific funders of the organized left in the country, and among the most disciplined about how that money is structured. One investigative accounting found that between 2004 and 2020, Omidyar’s grant-making vehicles paid out roughly $1.2 billion, the bulk of it after 2014, most flowing onward to left-of-center groups. Yet in the years his fortune was first compounding, he gave comparatively little directly to party committees. The direct check was never the instrument. The instrument was the foundation — and the layered set of charitable vehicles beneath it.
This giving does not stand alone, either. Alongside the philanthropy sits Omidyar Network, his self-described “philanthropic investment firm” — a hybrid that makes both charitable grants and for-profit venture investments, into which he and his wife have put more than $1.5 billion. He is also the founder of First Look Media, the parent of the news outlet The Intercept. The structure matters only as a tell: the same man runs a giving operation, an investing operation, and a media operation in parallel, and the civic money is routed through the side built for distance. Influence flows; attribution does not.
To see how this works, you do not need an anonymous source. You need his foundation’s tax return. And in the case of the Democracy Fund — the foundation Omidyar created in 2011 — the 2022 return lays the mechanism out in full.
Omidyar does not, as a rule, fund his foundations with cash. He funds them with stock — the eBay and PayPal shares that are the original substance of his fortune. The foundation then sells the shares and turns them into grant-able dollars. The 2022 filing shows exactly this, on a single page: six blocks of stock, each marked “D” for donation, all originally acquired in May 1996, all sold in the first week of December 2022.
| Asset sold (all donated, acq. 05/1996) | Gross sale |
|---|---|
| 180,000 shares eBay common stock | $8,126,087 |
| 180,000 shares eBay common stock | $8,099,574 |
| 180,000 shares eBay common stock | $7,945,605 |
| 193,333 shares PayPal common stock | $15,164,010 |
| 193,333 shares PayPal common stock | $14,567,727 |
| 193,334 shares PayPal common stock | $14,290,393 |
| Total proceeds · cost basis on the return: $22 | $68,193,374 |
Read what that page records. More than $68 million in founder stock, donated into the foundation and liquidated in one December week, against a cost basis of twenty-two dollars. The mechanism is the story. Donating appreciated stock rather than cash does two precise things at once, and both are legal and routine among the very wealthy:
It minimizes tax. Stock held since 1996 carries enormous unrealized gains. Donate it to your own foundation and you avoid the capital-gains tax that selling it yourself would trigger, while taking a charitable deduction at the shares’ full market value. The appreciation of decades is moved without ever being taxed as income.
It separates the name from the money. Once the shares become the foundation’s and are sold, the proceeds are the foundation’s money, not the donor’s. Every grant the foundation makes afterward is one legal step removed from Pierre Omidyar. This is why his representatives can say, accurately, that the Democracy Fund is an independent entity beyond his editorial control. The structure was built so both things are true at once: it is his money, and not his decision.
This is the same logic you met in Part II, one level up. There, the Franklin Education Forum carried the 65 Project inside itself as a disregarded entity, so no donor filing would name the campaign. Here, the foundation form places a legal membrane between the man and the grants. Neither is unusual; private foundations and fiscal sponsors exist precisely to create this kind of distance, on the right as much as the left. What makes it worth tracing is not that Omidyar uses the architecture. It is where the architecture delivers.
Most of the time, money like this is genuinely hard to follow — that is the design. But occasionally the filing names the destination outright, and the 2022 Democracy Fund return does exactly that. In the grants list, among hundreds of recipients, is this entry:
| Recipient | Stated purpose | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Franklin Education Forum800 Maine Ave SW Suite 400, Washington, DC | “Program support to The 65 Project” | $150,000 |
There is no inference required here. Omidyar’s foundation gave $150,000 to the Franklin Education Forum — the host you met in Part II, the umbrella that carried the 65 Project as a disregarded entity and routed $360,000 onward to the architect’s own LLC — with the purpose written on the return in plain words: program support to The 65 Project. The fortune built on eBay stock reached the campaign to disbar election lawyers, and the foundation said so itself, on a federal filing, naming the project as the purpose. The eBay billionaire helped pay for the machine.
If that were a single line in a single year, a skeptic could call it a one-time gesture. It was not. Pull the next two returns — the Democracy Fund’s 2023 and 2024 Forms 990-PF — and the same destination appears again, and again, larger, routed through a different intermediary:
| Year | Routed through | Stated purpose | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Franklin Education Forum | “Program support to The 65 Project” | $150,000 |
| 2023 | Global Impact | “Program support for The 65 Project” | $200,000 |
| 2024 | Global Impact | “Program support for The 65 Project” | $200,000 |
Read the three lines together. In 2022, $150,000 for the 65 Project, routed through the Franklin Education Forum. In 2023 and again in 2024, $200,000 each year for the same project — the purpose typed almost identically — this time routed through Global Impact, a different charitable intermediary in Washington. Same funder, same target, three years unbroken, a larger check, a new conduit. The pass-through changed; the pipeline did not. This is not a historical artifact of the 2020 aftermath. It is a standing, renewed, annual line item — half a million dollars across three filings — and it was still being paid out on the most recent return the foundation has filed.
The same returns also show how the money is fed. In 2024 the Democracy Fund took in tens of millions in donated stock — including 800,000 shares of Nu Holdings and 420,000 shares of PayPal, the contributions listed as coming from the Pierre M. Omidyar Trust itself. The 2022 mechanism was not a one-time event either; it is how this foundation is routinely capitalized. Founder stock in, anonymized grants out, year after year.
One fortune, one foundation, three doors. The first names the 65 Project outright — three years running, on the returns themselves. The second feeds the Arabella network that manages billions in left-of-center pass-through money. The third pours tens of millions into a union-linked donor-advised fund whose entire purpose is to make the next grant untraceable. The architecture does not hide the money. It hides the chain of custody.
That is the direct rail, now confirmed across three filings. The wider one runs through territory built specifically so that no line like those will ever appear.
The same 2022 return shows the Democracy Fund feeding the larger infrastructure of the organized left — the network INSIDE JOB readers will recognize. Among its grants: $1.5 million and a further $200,000 to the New Venture Fund (the flagship of the Arabella Advisors network) for its “Trusted Elections Fund” project; $500,000 to the New Venture Fund for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections; a grant to the Hopewell Fund, another Arabella entity; and grants to the Tides Foundation and Tides Center. These are not fringe recipients. The Arabella-managed funds together moved on the order of $1.7 billion over roughly a decade and a half — a pass-through apparatus larger, in a given year, than some national party committees, and built to convert identified donations into anonymized grants.
Omidyar’s ties to this network are documented beyond grants alone: his Democracy Fund Voice, the 501(c)(4) sibling of the Democracy Fund, is reported among the major donors to Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund. And the connection to the litigation side is no longer a matter of outside reporting — it is on the foundation’s own 2024 return. There, the Democracy Fund lists a $750,000 grant to the Arabella network’s Hopewell Fund, with the stated purpose “Program support for Free Election Fund” — the election-litigation operation formerly called the Democracy Docket Legal Fund, associated with the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias — plus additional Hopewell grants the same year.
The relationship runs closer still. On the 2023 return, the single highest-paid outside contractor the Democracy Fund lists is not a law firm or an accountant — it is Arabella Advisors, LLC itself, paid $678,750 for “consulting,” the largest such fee on the filing. The foundation that helps fund the 65 Project also pays the manager of the country’s biggest pass-through network to consult on its work. That is not a smoking gun; it is something quieter and more telling — the wiring of a single ecosystem, disclosed in the foundation’s own hand.
Notice what that means when you set it beside the line beneath the 65 Project. The same fortune appears on both sides of the same fight: helping fund the litigation shop that brings the favored election cases, and — by the foundation’s own return — the campaign that moves to disbar the lawyers on the other side. This is not proof of a single hand directing both in lockstep, and it should not be sold as that. It is something more durable and harder to wave away: a coherent ecosystem — common donors, shared vehicles, aligned goals — in which one fortune underwrites multiple arms of the same project while its name attaches, cleanly, to almost none of it.
Of every grant on the 2022 Democracy Fund return, the largest by far was not to any of the groups above. It was $43,970,118 — nearly forty-four million dollars, almost the entirety of the foundation’s grantmaking for the year — to a single recipient: the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation.
To understand why that figure matters, you have to know what Amalgamated is — and here the explanation is the same one we owe any reader, because the vehicle is used across the political spectrum.
A donor-advised fund (DAF) is a charitable account held at a sponsoring organization. A donor puts money in — very often appreciated stock — takes the full tax deduction immediately, and then recommends grants out over time. The decisive feature is what happens to the donor’s name: the outbound grant is legally made by the DAF sponsor, not by the person who funded the account.
As Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, has put it, a DAF “allows a donor to launder their identity” — because the actual donor of record becomes the sponsor, not the original giver. This is not a left or right phenomenon. The two best-known ideological DAF sponsors sit on opposite sides: DonorsTrust on the right, the Tides Foundation on the left. The single largest such move in recent memory was on the right — Barre Seid routed roughly $1.6 billion through this same architecture to Leonard Leo’s network. The tool is neutral. The question is never the tool. It is who wields it, and toward what end.
Amalgamated Charitable Foundation is one of these sponsors — on the left, with a specific pedigree. Its parent, Amalgamated Bank, was founded in 1923 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union and is the largest union-owned bank in America, managing tens of billions largely in union pension money. The Foundation (EIN 82-1517696), spun off in 2017, is its philanthropic arm — described by Inside Philanthropy as “the philanthropic giving platform facilitated by Amalgamated Bank” — and its growth is on its own tax returns: it reported just $252,946 in revenue in its first year (2017) and $396,906,311 in revenue against $359,985,594 in net assets by 2024. From a quarter-million dollars to nearly four hundred million in seven years. It runs scores of donor-advised and pooled “impact” funds. It is led by Anna Fink — previously a senior philanthropy adviser at the AFL-CIO and an officer at the Wyss Foundation — and, by its own account, it modeled itself in part on the older left DAF sponsors Tides and Proteus.
Now hold the two facts together. Omidyar’s foundation moved nearly $44 million — the overwhelming majority of its 2022 giving — into a union-born donor-advised-fund platform whose leadership comes directly out of the organized-labor world, and whose entire design is to make the next grant legally the platform’s gift rather than the donor’s.
What the record establishes: Omidyar’s Democracy Fund placed roughly $44 million — its single largest 2022 grant — into a donor-advised-fund sponsor built out of the labor movement, the AFL-CIO world with which the 65 Project’s aims are aligned.
What it does not establish: that those particular dollars then flowed onward to the 65 Project or any specific campaign. By design, a DAF makes that next step unverifiable from the public record — the trail goes cold at the platform’s door, deliberately. That opacity is not a gap in this account; it is the finding. The money enters a vehicle engineered so the next move cannot be followed, run by people from the same world the campaign serves.
And this is the structural point, true of every DAF sponsor whatever its politics: when Amalgamated grants money onward — as a platform of its size does, in large volume, every year — those outgoing grants are made in Amalgamated’s name. None of them names Omidyar, or the Democracy Fund, or any original donor as the source. That is not an accusation. It is simply how the instrument is built to work — and why, past this point, no honest reporter can tell you where the $44 million went.
And here is the part that should stop you, the irony that sits underneath all of it. The fortune doing this was built on eBay and PayPal stock. And the stock is the very instrument used to fund the foundations and pass-throughs that strip the name off the far end — the $68 million sale on the return is the same kind of shares that made him, now converted into untraceable charitable cash. The instrument of the wealth is the instrument of its concealment. A man who got rich building the most transparent public marketplace in the world — where every seller has a rating and every transaction a record — funds American politics through the least transparent machinery the law allows.
| The path | What the filing shows | Traceable? |
|---|---|---|
| The named rail2022 via Franklin Education Forum; 2023–24 via Global Impact | “Program support to/for The 65 Project” — $150,000 + $200,000 + $200,000 across 2022–2024 | Fully |
| The wider ecosystemNew Venture Fund, Hopewell, Sixteen Thirty (Arabella) | Trusted Elections Fund and Free Election Fund grants; Arabella Advisors itself the top-paid 2023 contractor ($678,750) | Partly |
| The donor-advised doorAmalgamated Charitable Foundation | $43,970,118 in 2022 — the single largest grant on the return — into a DAF platform | No, by design |
Set against all of it, the fair summary is the plainest one. None of this is illegal. Every step — the donated stock, the foundation, the pass-through funds, the donor-advised platform — is a lawful, widely used tool of American philanthropy. That is precisely what makes it worth your attention. It is not illegal. It is, by design, unaccountable. And the two are not the same thing.
Only now, with the funding architecture on the table, is it worth turning to a fact about Pierre Omidyar that requires care — both because it is easy to sensationalize and because it is too relevant to omit.
Omidyar holds three citizenships. He was born Parviz Morad Omidyar in Paris in 1967, to Iranian parents, and carries Iranian, French, and United States nationality. The Iranian citizenship is the one worth pausing on, because the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran are adversaries. That a single individual directs a multibillion-dollar apparatus reshaping an American institution, and also holds the passport of a hostile foreign power, is something a reader is entitled to know and to weigh.
But the lineage runs in the direction the lazy version of this story gets backwards, and honesty requires stating it plainly. Omidyar is not a son of the current Iranian regime. He is the grandson of General Mahmud Mir-Djalali, a senior figure of the Imperial Iranian Army, widely described as a father of Iran’s military industries and bound up with the rise of the Pahlavi monarchy. His family are aristocrats of the Shah’s Iran — precisely the class the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew and drove into exile. Whatever Omidyar’s Iranian citizenship represents, the documented record points away from Tehran’s clerical government, not toward it.
This series will not claim more than the record supports. There is no evidence that Pierre Omidyar acts on behalf of any foreign government, and the documented facts of his heritage point away from the current Iranian regime. What can be said plainly is only this: a man holding citizenship in a hostile foreign power sits atop a fortune quietly re-engineering an American institution. That is a fact worth keeping in view — a question held open — not a conclusion to be leapt to. Where evidence leads, this series follows; it does not run ahead.
The reason to raise it is not insinuation. It is the principle this whole series turns on: the more powerfully a private individual shapes a public institution, the more the public is entitled to know about who they are and where their power originates. Omidyar has spent two decades engineering the opposite — arranging his influence so that as little of his hand shows as the law permits. The passport is simply one more thing the architecture keeps at the edge of view.
It is tempting to find the loud donor more threatening — the one who funds openly and dares you to object. The opposite is nearer the truth. The open funder can be argued with, voted against, held to public account, because you can see him. The funder who has built distance into every layer has stepped outside the one mechanism a democracy uses to check private power: the ability to know who is acting, and why. You cannot hold to account what you cannot find.
That is the irony at the center of this series, stated cleanly. The 65 Project exists, in its own words, to enforce accountability on lawyers. Part of its documented funding traces to a fortune whose entire civic strategy is structured for the opposite — for distance, deniability, and the legal separation of the giver from the gift. The people who built a machine to judge whether others are fit to practice law arranged their own affairs so that the judging would never run the other way.
So, once more, the question that names this series. Who are they? In Part I, a method and a man. In Part II, an architect and her shells. In Part III, the deepest documented pocket — a fortune of more than ten billion dollars, moved through founder stock, foundations, pass-through networks, and a union-born donor-advised fund, so that it arrives at the work and is traceable, at the far end, almost nowhere.
We now know the weapon, the builder, and the bank. What we have not yet reckoned with is why the machine’s apparent failures were its design all along — why a campaign that lost the overwhelming majority of its cases was succeeding the entire time. The answer is not hidden. It is written on the Franklin Education Forum’s own tax return, in the line that defines what the 65 Project is for: a bipartisan effort to “deter future abuse of the legal system by lawyers.” Not to win. To deter. A campaign that announces deterrence as its purpose is telling you, in advance, that the verdicts were never the point — the fear of being dragged through the process was.
Part IV — The Deterrence Doctrine — on why losing most of the cases was never the failure it looked like, why the process itself was always the punishment, and what it means that they wrote the word “deter” on a federal filing.
• Democracy Fund, Inc., 2022 Form 990-PF (EIN 38-3926408): Part IV (capital gains — the $68,193,374 eBay/PayPal stock liquidation); Part XIV (grants — the $150,000 to Franklin Education Forum for “Program support to The 65 Project,” the New Venture Fund / Trusted Elections and Center for Secure and Modern Elections grants, the Hopewell and Tides grants, and the $43,970,118 to Amalgamated Charitable Foundation).
• Democracy Fund, Inc., 2023 Form 990-PF (EIN 38-3926408): Part XIV (the $200,000 to Global Impact for “Program support for The 65 Project”; New Venture Fund Trusted Elections Fund $1,500,000; States United Democracy Center $250,000; Hopewell Fund and multiple Tides grants); Part VII (Arabella Advisors, LLC the highest-paid independent contractor at $678,750); Part IV (no comparable stock sale) and Part II (total assets declining from ~$96M to ~$25.6M across the year).
• Democracy Fund, Inc., 2024 Form 990-PF (EIN 38-3926408): Part XIV (the $200,000 to Global Impact for “Program support for The 65 Project”; the $750,000 to Hopewell Fund for “Program support for Free Election Fund”; New Venture Fund Trusted Elections Fund $1,500,000); Part IV and Schedule B (donated stock — 800,000 shares of Nu Holdings and 420,000 shares of PayPal, contributed by the Pierre M. Omidyar Trust).
• The 65 Project’s self-described purpose — a bipartisan effort to “deter future abuse of the legal system by lawyers” — appears on the Franklin Education Forum 2022 Form 990, Schedule R (disregarded entities), where 65 Project LLC is listed under the Forum’s EIN 46-3009324.
• Net worth: Forbes / Bloomberg Billionaires Index profiles of Pierre Omidyar (2025–2026).
• Omidyar grant-making totals (~$1.2 billion, 2004–2020) and Democracy Fund Voice among major donors to Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund: Capital Research Center, “Omidyar’s Political Machine” series and “Donors to the Arabella Advisors Network.”
• Arabella network scale (~$1.7 billion, 2005–2021): Arabella Advisors reporting; New Venture Fund annual revenue per its filings.
• Hopewell Fund grant for the Free Election Fund (formerly Democracy Docket Legal Fund, associated with Marc Elias): $750,000, stated on the Democracy Fund 2024 Form 990-PF, Part XIV; background on the Arabella network via Capital Research Center.
• Donor-advised-fund mechanics and the “launder their identity” characterization: Prof. Roger Colinvaux (Catholic University), via Salon (Dec. 2023); DonorsTrust / Tides as leading ideological DAF sponsors; Barre Seid’s $1.6 billion to the Marble Freedom Trust / Leonard Leo network.
• Amalgamated Charitable Foundation (EIN 82-1517696): founded out of Amalgamated Bank (est. 1923 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union; largest union-owned bank in the U.S.); “philanthropic giving platform facilitated by Amalgamated Bank” per Inside Philanthropy; CEO Anna Fink, formerly AFL-CIO and the Wyss Foundation. Revenue growth from $252,946 (2017) to $396,906,311 revenue and $359,985,594 net assets (2024) per its Forms 990 on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.
• Heritage and citizenship: born Parviz Morad Omidyar, Paris, 1967; Iranian, French, and U.S. nationality; grandson of Imperial Iranian Army General Mahmud Mir-Djalali: public biographical records.