Vanity project for elder Soros came after Soros-funded Open Society Foundations slashed its workforce in a cost-cutting move
The left-wing philanthropy funded by George Soros, Open Society Foundations (OSF), paid Columbia University $600,000 to produce an “oral history” of the left-wing billionaire—a vanity project undertaken months after the organization laid off nearly half of its workforce.
OSF, which Soros founded in the 1980s, awarded the lucrative grant to Columbia sometime last year, its website shows. It gave Columbia two years to produce “an oral history of the Open Society Foundations and their founder to educate the public on his impact and philanthropy,” according to the grant description. The grant made up 40 percent of the $1.5 million in funding OSF awarded to Columbia in 2024.
The OSF receives the vast majority of its funds from Soros, who has given more than $32 billion to the organization.
The vainglorious venture is likely to raise eyebrows at OSF, now overseen by Soros’s son Alex, who slashed the organization’s workforce and grant-giving in recent years as the 95-year-old Soros pulled back from the organization. The elder Soros tapped his son to take over the nonprofit in December 2022, shortly after Alex Soros lost nearly $2 billion of his father’s money on an investment in electric car maker Rivian. In June 2023, OSF fired more than 40 percent of its global workforce.
“My father didn’t want to create an employment agency, he wanted to create a network of networks and he was very upset with the amount of bureaucracy at the foundation,” Alex Soros said after the dismissals.
OSF offered resources to employees affected by the layoffs, including a workshop on “Well-being in uncertain times,” and opportunities to meet with a “People and culture advisory partner.” That did little to assuage staffers, who issued a letter from their union in August 2023 that accused Soros and the philanthropy of “union busting” by outsourcing staff positions to outside contractors.
“It’s incredible that, after his bad investment in Rivian lost nearly $2 billion of daddy’s money, Alex tightened the belt and laid off 40 percent of OSF staff while making enough room in the budget for an over-credentialed hagiography,” said Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, a watchdog group that tracks liberal special interest groups, including OSF.
Alex Soros, who gave up a playboy lifestyle to marry longtime Hillary Clinton body woman Huma Abedin earlier this year, has faced scathing reviews from OSF insiders during his short tenure.
One longtime employee told New York magazine earlier this year that Alex Soros “was exactly the wrong person to lead the foundation.” Another called him “smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the details.”
The younger Soros, who often refers to his father as “the GOAT,” or the “Greatest of All Time,” has also ruffled feathers for preening alongside Democratic politicians, including some who prefer not to be seen as too cozy with the scion of a hedge fund billionaire empire.
According to New York magazine, Alex Soros created a “PR headache” when he posted a photo from his Manhattan condo with then-vice presidential candidate Tim Walz during the 2024 campaign. He also posted a photo with New York mayor-to-be Zohran Mamdani (D.) after his election victory last week. That proved awkward, given that Mamdani has said “billionaires shouldn’t exist.”
Details about the Soros oral history project are unclear. Columbia has not released any details about the project and did not respond to requests for comment.
OSF has paid Columbia for other oral history projects burnishing the nonprofit’s image. It gave $214,333 to the school in 2022 for an oral history of Aryeh Neier, the organization’s first president, according to grant records. Columbia researchers interviewed a number of Neier’s colleagues, who reflected “warmly on working for, collaborating with, and learning from Neier” while touting OSF and its “global struggle for democracy and justice.”
OSF gave an additional $71,513 last year to Columbia for an “educational event” for the school’s oral history department. The school held a launch event of the oral history project on Neier on Sept. 9, 2024. Dozens of people attended the event.
OSF has doled out more than $30 billion in grants—funded by George’s hedge fund empire—to foreign and domestic organizations to advance a variety of liberal causes. In the United States, OSF funds a number of anti-police and anti-Israel groups, having sent $18 million to the Movement for Black Lives and $2.3 million to Al-Haq, a non-governmental organization based in the West Bank that has alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—a terrorist group.
Those and other grants have landed the Soros family in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who over the summer called for the father-son duo to be prosecuted over “their support of Violent Protests” across the country.
