In 2021, Google co-founder Sergey Brin launched a nonprofit focused on health and climate change, funded by the sale of Tesla following his falling out with that company’s co-founder, Elon Musk, Bloomberg reports. 

Initially funded with approximately $366 million, Catalyst4 is a 501(c)(4), a popular giving vehicle used by billionaires such as Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, hedge fund founder Ray Dalio, and members of the Koch family. Gifts to a 501(c)(4) are not tax-deductible, but the vehicle allows for tax breaks on capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and gift levies, as well as flexibility and secrecy when it comes to political influence. According to Bloomberg, Brin is not named in organizational filings, but board members from his family office, Bayshore Global Management, with which Catalyst4 shares a mailing address, are named. Brin also has a family foundation. 

According to Bloomberg, Catalyst4 has spent $30,000 in 2023 on lobbying for “monitoring diseases through municipal wastewater systems to inform public health responses.” The organization’s funding of drug discovery and research will include venture capital investments, according to a May 2022 filing, “focusing on companies that invent, develop, and/or commercialize products that address high unmet medical needs” related to the central nervous system. A 2021 tax filing shows the organization holds 74.25 percent ownership of Column Group-Neuro, a fund that raised $100 million in May 2021.

The goals of Catalyst4 are “supporting breakthroughs in the treatment of [central nervous system] neurological diseases/disorders, and in efforts to mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change,” according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service obtained by Bloomberg. 

(Photo credit: Flickr/Charles Haynes)