Having His Say

Robert W. Wilson was a daring professional investor and made huge profits speculating on small companies,

while simultaneously betting that overvalued firms would fall, before he retired in 1986. He turned an initial stake of $15,000 into a multimillion-dollar fortune — earning a return of more than 30 percent per year.

He loved the game’s exacting calculus, which let him know each day exactly how he was doing, and over time he earned a reputation as one of the great investors. He was featured in John Train’s The Money Masters, a 1980 best seller that also profiled Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham.

Mr. Wilson’s skill at making money left him with a problem — what to do with all the cash. Thanks to his own returns — and those earned by other managers after he retired — Mr. Wilson was worth $800-million when the stock market peaked in 2000.

He has been divorced for more than 30 years and has no children. While he enjoys fine wine, opera, and five-star restaurants, he has little interest in the wildly expensive preoccupations of rich people, like multiple homes, jets, and yachts.

“I’ve always said that one of the most boring things to do with money is spend it,” Mr. Wilson says.

Donating 70% of His Fortune

Mr. Wilson, who is 81, had drawn up a complicated will in the 1990s, but he scrapped that plan after a lunch in 2000 with Roger Hertog, a businessman and fellow philanthropist.

“Roger said, ‘You lazy good-for-nothing!’” Mr. Wilson recalls. “‘You’re going to horse around until you die and then shove all this dough on your accountant. Why don’t you give some of it away while you still have a few marbles left?’”

That conversation persuaded Mr. Wilson to give away 70 percent of his fortune while he was still alive. It also gave birth to one of the more unusual — and most frank — major donors in America.

Mr. Wilson has been on The Chronicle’s list of the 50 most-generous donors in four of the past six years, and by the end of this year, he expects to have nearly completed four $100-million matching grants to environmental- and historical-conservation groups.

Mr. Wilson is among the biggest donors ever to environmental causes, but he has no interest in actually partaking of wilderness. He prefers a stroll through Central Park, which he looks down on from the balcony of his 16th-floor co-op apartment.

He describes his environmental giving as “helping a lot of people a little bit,” and he believes that seemingly grander philanthropic efforts — like improving health in Africa — are often “feel good” gifts destined to fail.

Mr. Wilson is an atheist, yet last year he made a $22.5-million gift to help low-income children attend Catholic elementary schools in New York.

And although he has already given away nearly $500-million, he says he receives few emotional rewards from his philanthropy.

“It’s sort of a duty,” says Mr. Wilson, during a recent interview in his apartment, which is filled with modern art and brightly colored vases.

Most Foundations Are a ‘Disgrace’

Mr. Wilson says he lives happily on $200,000 per year (aside from housing costs) — a relative pittance for a man who, despite all his giving, is still worth half a billion dollars. That leaves plenty of money for philanthropy.

But as he surveyed the field of philanthropy, he found mostly approaches that he wanted to avoid.

He believes most private foundations are a “disgrace” — costly, unfocused, and prone to stray from the philosophies of their deceased founders. That’s why he intends to give away most of his money while he is alive and why he has instructed the executor of his estate to distribute the remaining funds to charities within 10 years of his death.

He believes that many American philanthropists give according to a “white man’s burden matrix” — without weighing the likelihood of success. He believes, for example, that most of the billions of dollars being spent by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve health in Africa are “going to go down the drain.”

He views Africa as a dysfunctional continent, where lasting change is hard to accomplish. “Just look at [the recent unrest in] Kenya,” he says. “This is a model country. Every one of them goes up and down. It’s so depressing.” (Mr. Hertog, his friend, once described Mr. Wilson as “the most politically incorrect person I have ever met.”)

Mr. Wilson also believes rich people often err in trying to be as creative with their philanthropy as they were in making their money. He views that approach as unlikely to succeed — especially for people who give away large sums.

In his own giving, Mr. Wilson has looked for established organizations that could use his millions to take a leap forward. He started with relatively small gifts to the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the World Monuments Fund in the 1990s, but by the early years of this decade, he had made $100-million matching pledges to all four.

He gravitated to environmental causes because few other donors were making very large gifts to such organizations. “I was looking for an area where I could have significant impact and one that was underserved philanthropically,” he says.

He supports the World Monuments Fund, which protects endangered works of historic art and architecture around the world, for the same reason he was drawn to environmental groups. He wants to ensure that irreplaceable treasures will be around for future generations to enjoy.

“He’s one of the few people deeply committed to environmental conservation who see the ‘built environment’ as part of that picture,” says Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund.

Despite his contention that he gets little emotional satisfaction from giving, he clearly takes some pride in what his money has accomplished.

At the Nature Conservancy, Mr. Wilson helped elevate the charity’s international programs by agreeing to give a dollar in a donor’s home state for every dollar that the donor gave to the charity’s work abroad.

The Nature Conservancy now raises $50-million per year for international programs, up from less than $10-million when the challenge started.

“He wanted to get people to go beyond their backyard,” says Dan Quinn, the conservancy’s senior philanthropy officer for global priorities. “He wanted them to understand that conservation is a global issue.”

His money helped the Environmental Defense Fund draw attention to the threats posed by global warming, and as that issue gained prominence, the charity has added several billionaires to its board. “There’s no question that because of Bob’s generosity we enjoy a broader base of support,” says David Yarnold, the charity’s executive director.

The Wildlife Conservation Society is now spending $75-million per year on animal-conservation programs, three times as much as when the challenge started in 2000. And the World Monuments Fund now operates on a budget of $20-million per year, up from $5-million per year when the challenge started.

“I’ve transformed all of these organizations,” Mr. Wilson says.

Despite the progress at the three environmental charities, he remains pessimistic about the planet’s future. He calls the recent craze for corn-based ethanol — which requires considerable energy to produce — “a disaster environmentally.”

He believes the economic incentives used to reduce carbon emissions, known as cap and trade, have made some traders of emissions rights rich but done little to help the environment. Sometimes Mr. Wilson thinks the world would be better off if the buzz over global warming had never caught on.

“If it’s coming as rapidly as all the evidence suggests it is, I think we’re screwed, and my money isn’t going to be able to do a thing,” he says.

Law-School Dropout

Mr. Wilson grew up in Detroit, in a “lower upper class” family that belonged to the “second-best clubs.” He dropped out of law school and eventually joined an investment bank. He says his career wasn’t going anywhere, so he began dabbling in the stock market. In 1968, he struck out on his own.

He never managed much money for others because he didn’t think they would be comfortable with his strategies. He preferred risky stocks, believing he would be compensated with higher returns. “I would always say if a stock you’re recommending to me can’t go down 50 percent, I’m not interested,” he says. He stayed diversified so that one bad pick wouldn’t knock him out of the game, and he shorted stocks (bet that they would lose value) during an era when few investors used that strategy, to limit his downside in bear markets.

Ample Research

Mr. Wilson often applies the same skills to his philanthropy that he used in the investment business.

When he wanted to make a $100-million matching grant to one of the many charities that help conserve wildlife, he was inclined to give to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which he had supported with smaller gifts for decades.

To assure himself that the charity was the best of the bunch, he took the extraordinary step of hiring three consultants to study the charity’s operations in Africa for two months, at a total cost of $250,000.

The consultants found that the Wildlife Conservation Society could benefit from a large investment, but they also uncovered some areas that could be improved.

They concluded, for example, that the scientists in local programs were spending too much time on tasks like accounting, fund raising, and reporting results and that such tasks could be handled in a more systematic way with better support from the national office.

Mr. Wilson made the $100-million pledge — but he also passed the report along to Steven E. Sanderson, the charity’s president, who used the conservation group’s own money to develop a system to remedy the problems uncovered by the consultants.

“If they could tell us about how we could be more effective, that was all to the good,” Mr. Sanderson says.

Aside from his $100-million matching grants to the four charities, the next largest recipient of Mr. Wilson’s philanthropy is the New York Public Library. He has given the library nearly $42-million over four decades, and his largest gift — a $25-million pledge over five years, much of which was used for new acquisitions and to process collections at the Performing Arts Library — came in 2005.

In 1994, before the library even had a Web site, Mr. Wilson gave the library $2.5-million to convert the printed catalog of the research libraries into an online format. “It was a pioneering gift for us,” says Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library. “That was the beginning of the online presence of the library.”

Mr. Wilson says he supports the library because “I believe in having a place where people can go to educate themselves, without needing to concern themselves about degrees.” He says “far too many people” are going to college when they should be out working, where he believes they will develop greater skills than they will sitting in a classroom.

“The masses going to college is just a waste of time at enormous expense,” Mr. Wilson says.

Patron of the Arts

Mr. Wilson is, however, a big supporter of the arts. He is on the board of both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Opera.

Mr. LeClerc says he once had dinner with Mr. Wilson and Regina Resnik, the opera singer and actress, and that his companions dissected the operas they had seen over the preceding 40 years.

“He has an encyclopedic knowledge about that art form,” Mr. LeClerc says.

Mr. Wilson gives the Metropolitan Opera and the Whitney several hundred thousand dollars per year but has no plans to leave the groups any money upon his death. He believes “high-class forms of entertainment” like the opera should be supported by those who are currently enjoying them.

“If after I’m dead, people are no longer interested, why should I care?” he says.

The four charities that received $100-million matching grants from Mr. Wilson will have to get by without his support for the immediate future.

“I want to see how they do without it for a couple of years,” Mr. Wilson says.

On more than one occasion, Mr. Wilson has called making money “the greatest pleasure in the world, and I mean the greatest,” and even now, he says, the rewards of philanthropy don’t come close to matching it.

What he misses most is the stark measurement of achievement that investing provided. It is difficult enough for charities to demonstrate results from their programs, and it is even more challenging to tease out the role that a donor’s money may have played.

“If this [gift to Catholic schools] comes a cropper, first of all the media won’t know it, and maybe even I won’t know it,” Mr. Wilson says. “But if I owned a stock and it came a cropper, I’d know it.”