Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation

Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corporation, and his wife Betty I. Moore established the foundation in 2000 using Intel stock. The Moores, who both died in 2023, remained active in the foundation’s operation until their deaths. The foundation has provided hundreds of millions in grants to left-of-center advocacy groups including the ClimateWorks Foundation, EarthJustice, and the Environmental Defense Fund, ³ with environmental activism and conservation projects being the dominant program area. ^{4 5}

Background

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, best known as the author of the aphorism “Moore’s Law” which predicted the rapid acceleration in microchip production and increasing affordability of computer products, established the Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation (also known as the Moore Foundation) with his wife Betty, in 2000. Gordon funded the foundation’s endowment with 175 million shares of Intel stock in 2001. The Moores remained active with the foundation until their deaths in 2023. During its first 15 years of operation, the foundation devoted 46.2 percent of its grants to environmental conservation, 33.1 percent to science, 10.1 percent to patient care, and 8.8 percent to projects in the San Francisco Bay area. ^{6 2}

Grantmaking Activity

The Moore Foundation is among the largest private foundations in the United States, reporting over $11 billion in assets at the end of 2024, and annual spending of over $400 million in 2023 and 2024. ¹

Environmental Grantmaking

The Moore Foundation launched its environmental program in 2001, with a series of grants totaling $261 million over a 10-year period to Conservation International (CI) to create a Global Conservation Fund (GCF) “to stop species extinctions in biodiversity hotspots and to protect large areas of major tropical wilderness areas.” These grants, which eventually grew to $395 million, represented the largest gift to date to a private conservation organization. ^{7 8}

Since 2003, the foundation has awarded over $3.3 million to the David Suzuki Foundation, a radical environmental organization whose founder and namesake has called for criminalizing opposition to the environmentalist agenda. ^{9 10 11}

The Moore Foundation’s environmental grants have supported organizations and campaigns opposing major industrial and extractive projects. It was a key funder in an over decade-long effort to prevent the development of the Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed, providing significant resources to groups such as Trout Unlimited, the Alaska Conservation Foundation, Earthworks, and the Nature Conservancy for studies, public campaigns, and coordination that contributed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rare use of an administrative veto of the project under the Clean Water Act during the Biden administration. ^{12 13 14 15 16}

The foundation has also channeled substantial funding to entities within the Arabella Advisors network, a left-of-center fiscal sponsorship and advocacy infrastructure. It provided support to the Windward Fund, an Arabella-managed entity focused on climate and conservation initiatives, as well as the New Venture Fund and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. ^{17 18}

Other prominent environmental grantees include Conservation International, the David Suzuki Foundation, the ClimateWorks Foundation, EarthJustice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Earth Innovation Institute, and the Inuit Circumpolar Council. ^{17 18}

Science and Health Care

The Moore Foundation has maintained separate grantmaking programs in science and patient care, including major commitments to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech); the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at the University of California, Davis; and biomedical and astronomical research. ³

Gordon and Betty Moore’s 2001 commitment of $600 million over ten years to Caltech was the largest ever to an institution of higher education at the time. ¹⁹

In 2016, the foundation launched the Moore Inventor Fellows, providing early-career scientist-inventors with $825,000 over three years to work on “unique and groundbreaking projects.” The foundation allocated $34 million through 2026 to support 50 Moore Inventor Fellows. ²⁰

San Francisco Bay

The Moore Foundation has donated more than $284 million to conservation projects and museums in the San Francisco Bay area. Roughly $172 million has been devoted to conservation. Funding has supported local trusts in more than 80 acquisitions, easements, and “other conservation-related projects” in order to prevent development and “sustain the biodiversity” in the region. Grants have also been awarded to local conservation initiatives, including Audubon California’s effort to protect the habitat of the Pacific herring, Sempervirens Fund’s proposal for a “carbon bank” for owners of redwood forest land in the Santa Cruz Mountain area, and a study by the San Francisco Estuary Institute and the 5 Gyres Institute on microplastic pollution in San Francisco Bay. The foundation’s Bay Area giving also supports several local museums, including Exploratorium, the Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science, the Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Chabot Space and Science Center. ^{21 22 23 24}

Leadership

Aileen Lee

Aileen Lee was appointed president of the Moore Foundation in 2026, succeeding Harvey Fineberg. Lee had worked at the foundation since 2002 and previously worked as chief of programs, overseeing grantmaking exceeding $500 million annually. Lee attended Yale University and Harvard Law School and sits on the boards of the Climate and Land Use Alliance, iNaturalist, the Legacy Landscapes Fund, and the Marin Community Foundation. ²⁵

Ken Moore

Ken Moore, the son of the founders Gordon and Betty Moore, has been chairman of the foundation’s board since 2022. He previously was on the foundation’s staff for over 20 years, working as both chief administrative officer and chief program officer for the Bay Area. ²⁶

Gordon Moore

Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel Corporation and chairman emeritus of the Intel board of directors. Moore was the chief executive officer at Intel from 1975 to 1987, and was the chairman until 1997 when he became chairman emeritus. He is the namesake of “Moore’s Law,” his 1965 contention that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a chip would double every year, which has become a slang term for the rapid pace of technological advancement. ⁴

Moore received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2002 and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. He died in 2023 at age 94, and his wife, Betty Moore, died eight months later. ^{27 28 29}

Harvey Fineberg

Harvey V. Fineberg is a physician and the former president of the Moore Foundation. Prior, Fineberg held the presidential chair as visiting professor at the University of California, San Francisco; worked as president of the Institute of Medicine and as provost of Harvard University, and worked as dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. He also helped found and worked as president of the Society for Medical Decision Making, and co-authored the books Clinical Decision Analysis, Innovators in Physician Education, and The Epidemic that Never Was. ^{30 31}