# Yass Foundation (Susquehanna Foundation) **Draft profile.** Philanthropic vehicle of **Jeffrey Yass** — co-founder of **Susquehanna International Group (SIG)**, Pennsylvania's wealthiest person, and one of the most consequential Republican megadonors of the 2020s. Yass's estimated net worth as of 2026 is **~$65.7B** (Forbes), making him the **27th-richest person in the world** and putting him roughly on par with [[Mark Zuckerberg]] and [[Sergey Brin]] in scale. Since **2015**, Yass has donated **more than $350M** to political campaigns, making him the **6th-largest political donor of 2015–2024** — **ahead of [[Elon Musk]] and just behind [[George Soros]]**. The Yass Foundation (sometimes referred to as Susquehanna Foundation) operates out of the same Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania office as SIG, run by Yass and longtime SIG executives. **The single most defining policy focus is school choice / vouchers** — Yass has staked the bulk of his political giving on the proposition that universal school vouchers will reshape American education. ## The Wealth Source: Susquehanna International Group Susquehanna is a **quantitative trading firm** that Yass co-founded in **1987** with several college poker buddies. Distinctives: - **Options market-making** — Susquehanna is one of the world's largest options-trading operations. - **Multi-asset trading** — equities, options, futures, currencies, sports betting, commodities, crypto, prediction markets. - **Heavy use of statistical/probabilistic methods** — Yass and his co-founders are renowned poker players; the firm's culture is built around game theory and expected-value reasoning. - **Private, no outside capital** — SIG has never taken outside investment; the partners own the firm. - **15,000+ employees** globally. - **TikTok investor** — Yass holds a **~15% stake in ByteDance**, TikTok's parent company. Estimated value as of 2024: $40–50B. This single investment is the largest single holding in Yass's net worth. The poker-game-theory cultural backbone matters: Yass approaches politics the way he approaches markets — **identify mispriced bets, deploy capital aggressively, hold positions for the long term**. The school-choice giving is treated as a high-conviction long-horizon investment. ## Focus Areas ### School choice / vouchers (primary) Yass's policy obsession is universal school vouchers. He has funded: - **Pennsylvania** — Pro-voucher state legislative campaigns; tax-credit-scholarship advocacy; Commonwealth Foundation funding. - **Texas** — **$6M+ to Governor [[Greg Abbott]]** for the 2023–2024 Texas voucher push; backed primary challenges against anti-voucher Texas House Republicans. - **South Carolina** — Personally **funded the SC voucher program** after a state court ruled the publicly-funded version unconstitutional. Yass committed private capital to keep the program running. - **Kentucky** — **$5M to a PAC** supporting the 2024 Kentucky constitutional amendment for school vouchers (defeated). - **National** — Major funder of the **American Federation for Children**, Yass Prize ($1M+ per school), and the **EdChoice** advocacy ecosystem. The Washington Post's 2025 long-form interview confirmed Yass treats school vouchers as the single highest-leverage political bet he can make — both ideologically (he is libertarian and views public schools as a state monopoly) and tactically (he believes vouchers will collapse Democratic Party voter coalitions). ### Libertarian / free-market causes - **Cato Institute** — major sustained funder. - **Club for Growth** — Yass is one of the largest single donors; Club for Growth has been a major MAGA-aligned political operation in the 2020s. - **Americans for Prosperity** ([[Koch Network]] adjacent). - **State Policy Network** affiliated state-level free-market think tanks. ### Crypto and prediction markets - SIG trades crypto and is one of the major Wall Street operators in **prediction markets** ([[Polymarket]] adjacent). - Yass has personally advocated for crypto-favorable regulation. ### Election-administration - Funded post-2020 election-integrity / election-administration operations, though more quietly than the Mercer or Uihlein operations. ## Why It Matters in This KB ### 1. He is the largest current Republican megadonor that most people have never heard of The MAGA megadonor coverage tends to focus on [[Peter Thiel]], [[Elon Musk]], the [[Mercer Family Foundation]], and the [[Uihlein Family Foundation]]. **Yass outspent all of them between 2015 and 2024** — $350M+, 6th-largest U.S. political donor of the period — while maintaining a much lower public profile. The Inquirer's December 2025 long-form interview was Yass's first major sit-down with a national publication, and even that was carefully managed. ### 2. The school-voucher concentration is a single-issue political bet at unusual scale Most megadonors give across a broad menu of conservative causes. Yass is **explicitly issue-focused** — Washington Post and Inquirer reporting confirms he treats school vouchers as the single highest-leverage bet in American politics. **The cumulative effect of $200M+ in single-issue funding** has materially reshaped Pennsylvania, Texas, South Carolina, Arizona, and Iowa school policy. **This is one of the cleanest documented cases of single-donor policy capture in modern U.S. history.** ### 3. The TikTok stake is a politically explosive holding Yass's ~15% ByteDance stake makes him the **largest single Western financial beneficiary of TikTok's continued U.S. operation**. His political donations have correlated with **Republican shift away from TikTok bans** — including direct lobbying influence on Trump's evolving 2024 position. The conflict-of-interest pattern is documented but under-prosecuted. ### 4. He is the structural counterpart to George Soros Reporting frequently pairs Yass with [[George Soros]] — both are quantitative-finance billionaires deploying their fortunes into politics, both treat philanthropy as a strategic investment, both are issue-focused (Soros on democracy / open society; Yass on school choice / libertarianism). **Yass-Soros is the cleanest cross-spectrum analog in current American mega-donor philanthropy.** Where Soros has been mythologized by the right as the foundational left megadonor, Yass is largely under-mythologized as his right-wing counterpart. ### 5. The SIG poker-game-theory culture is a distinctive operational fingerprint Unlike most conservative foundations, the Yass operation explicitly thinks in **expected-value, long-horizon, high-conviction bet** terms. That cultural fingerprint matters because it produces very different giving patterns than [[Bradley Foundation]] (think-tank capacity-building) or [[Mercer Family Foundation]] (media-and-data operations). Yass invests in **legislative state-by-state campaigns** because he views them as the highest-leverage bets available. ## The Trump Pivot Yass spent the 2016–2020 period as a **Never-Trump libertarian** — backed [[Ted Cruz]], then [[Rand Paul]], generally opposed Trump in primaries. The 2024 cycle marked a **structural shift**: Yass personally met with Trump in March 2024 at [[Mar-a-Lago]], after which Trump publicly **reversed his TikTok-ban position**, and Yass became one of the major Republican-aligned funders for 2024–2026. The TikTok-stake / TikTok-policy correlation is the documented conflict-of-interest in this shift. ## Critiques - **TikTok conflict of interest** — the most documented and politically active critique. - **Single-issue policy capture** — school voucher legislation now reflects Yass-funded advocacy more than any other private interest. - **Operational opacity** — like [[the Mercers]], Yass's foundation grant-detail is not as transparent as the [[Open Phil]] / Schmidt model. - **Game-theory framing of politics** — critics argue Yass's "high-conviction bets" framing reduces democratic outcomes to financial-portfolio thinking. - **Pennsylvania-specific influence** — Yass is the dominant political donor in Pennsylvania state politics, with documented effects on state legislative outcomes. ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Add [[Jeffrey Yass]] profile - Document the full SIG corporate structure - Trace specific school-voucher legislative outcomes attributable to Yass funding - Map Yass's relationship to [[Polymarket]] / prediction-market regulation - Detail the March 2024 Trump-Yass Mar-a-Lago meeting and the TikTok policy reversal - Document the Yass Prize ($1M+ to "outstanding" schools) and its recipient pattern - Investigate Yass's quieter funding of election-administration and judicial-confirmation work - Compare with Soros / Open Society Foundations as cross-spectrum analog ## See Also - [[Jeffrey Yass]] — Founder (currently unlinked) - [[Club for Growth]] — Major recipient - [[Cato Institute]] — Major recipient - [[American Federation for Children]] — Major recipient - [[EdChoice]] — Adjacent school-choice ecosystem - [[Mercer Family Foundation]] — Adjacent MAGA megadonor philanthropy - [[Uihlein Family Foundation]] — Adjacent MAGA megadonor philanthropy - [[George Soros]] (currently unlinked) — Structural cross-spectrum counterpart - [[Open Society Foundations]] — Soros structural counterpart vehicle - [[Koch Network]] — Adjacent libertarian operation - [[Polymarket]] — Yass-adjacent prediction-market operation - [[School Choice Ecosystem]] — Operational map - [[Philanthropy Ecosystem]] — Money-flow MOC - [[Dark Money Ecosystem]] — Operational map