The MacArthur Foundation's Portfolio

This week, we’ll look at the portfolio for the MacArthur Foundation, a $9 billion foundation based in Chicago.

John MacArthur acquired the Bankers Life and Casualty Company for $2,500 in 1935 and built it into the nation’s largest privately held insurance company. At the time of his death in 1978, the company had more than 3 million policyholders and he was one of the three wealthiest men in America. John was also active in Florida real estate, at one point holding more than 100,000 acres in the Palm Beach and Sarasota areas. His wife Catherine was also active in the insurance business, serving as a director and corporate secretary, always under her maiden name, C.T. Hyland.

When John and Catherine created the foundation in 1970, John told its first board, “I made the money; you guys will have to figure out what to do with it.” Since that time, the foundation has given grants of more than $8 billion in areas including climate change, criminal justice reform, nuclear security, public health, and journalism. The foundation also sponsors the well-known MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the MacArthur Genius Grants, which are awarded to people who have exhibited exceptional creativity in their fields. Past winners of the award include Lin-Manuel Miranda, David Foster Wallace, and Atul Gawande.

Susan Manske is the current CIO and is planning to retire in June 2025 after more than 20 years at the foundation. The foundation is currently looking for its next CIO to lead its 17-person investment team.

The foundation reported annualized returns of 8.5% over the last 10 years as of 12/31/23 vs. the ACWI at ~8% and the S&P at ~12% over the same period. The portfolio is comprised of ~35% private assets, in line with many well-known endowments:

In Friday’s full OWL Insights newsletter for our users, we included a table with 30+ of the foundation’s managers, including Hongshan, Radcliffe, and Perbak. Additionally, the foundation is invested in a number of multi-strat and quant managers including Millennium, Schonfeld, Citadel, Balyasny, Exoduspoint, AQR, and Two Sigma. OWL users can see the foundation’s entire disclosed portfolio on the platform.

One manager of note is SDC Capital Partners, a private equity firm focused on the digital infrastructure sector. SDC was founded by Todd Aaron in 2017. Prior to SDC, Aaron co-founded Sentinel Data Centers in 2001 and served as the co-CEO until 2017. Over those 16 years, Sentinel developed two multi-asset data center platforms that were sold to two public data center REITs in 2010 and 2017.

The MacArthur Foundation has invested in SDC’s Fund I, Fund II, and Fund III. Other notable LPs for SDC include MIT, Mass General Brigham, and the YMCA Retirement Fund. After initial allocations in 2020 and 2021, the University of Michigan allocated $145M to two SDC funds in 2024, the second largest manager allocation they have disclosed in the last several years. OWL users can see disclosed portfolios for these allocators and hundreds of others in our OWL allocator database.

SDC’s AUM has grown substantially over the past few years:

We can see in OWL’s fund-level view that this is due to growth in their original funds, as well as new funds launched in 2020 and 2022.

Other News & Events

• Rice University names John Lawrence as CIO

• Future Fund invests with Effissimo

• WSJ profile of Nick Maounis/Verition

• Jeff Wang transitioning leadership of SCGE

• Interview with DUMAC General Counsel/COO

• Truebridge’s study on the State of the Venture Capital Industry

• Article on Sylebra Capital’s losses amid market volatility

• Bain’s 2025 Global Private Equity Report

• Singapore hedge fund Kings Court bets big on Suzuki

• Bates College transitions endowment manager to Investure

• Article on General Catalyst considering an IPO

• NYC Comptroller is hiring an Investment Officer – Private Equity

About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.