In a story that is surprising to not a single person with a pulse, a New York hedge fund billionaire, David E. Shaw, is making headlines today for donating over $37 million to several elite universities over the last few years — including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and MIT. In fact, it’s reported that Shaw has made $1 million annual gifts to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Princeton, while poor Columbia, Brown, and MIT only got $500,000 annual gifts.

NY Billionaire Donates Over $37 Million to Elite Colleges

As reports Kate Sheehy for The New York Post in a piece entitled “Inside Manhattan billionaire David Shaw’s $37M plan to get his kids into a top college,” “Shaw, the 68-year-old founder of the renowned hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co., has three children with his financial journalist wife: Rebecca, 23, Adam, 21, and high school sophomore Jacob. Rebecca graduated from Yale in 2018. She is now a writer for TV’s ’The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.’ Adam is enrolled at Yale. Jacob still attends the tony Horace Mann School in Manhattan, where both his older siblings went. Their father, worth an estimated $7.3 billion, went to the University of California, San Diego, the article noted, while their mother was rejected from Yale and went to Brown. Shaw handled the process of their kids’ college admissions like he does everything in his life: with excruciating precision, the report said.”

The Billionaire is Well Known for His Intensity Concerning the Education of His Children

In New York society circles, it’s no secret that the Shaws have long had a reputation for being, well, super intense about the education of their children. So it doesn’t come as any surprise to us that the hedge fund billionaire would diversify not only his portfolio but also his investments in elite colleges. He can certainly make the argument that he wasn’t donating these immense sums to all these schools to improve the cases for admission of his children. But the world is free to draw their own conclusions. And they’re free to read the report by ProPublica about the business tycoon on which The New York Post based its reporting.