Invited guests at Foster Friess’s birthday party in 2010 were asked to pick a favored charity. The Wyoming multimillionaire and his wife, Lynn, were both turning 70. To celebrate, they would pick one of the guests’ chosen causes and donate $70,000 to it. At dinner at the Jackson Hole Four Seasons, guests were all handed envelopes, and whoever had the winning one was asked to stand up while everyone else remained seated.
Everyone stood.
“Within seconds,” Molly Greene III recounted to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, “everybody was standing up and yelling, ‘I won! I won!’”
The charities that night included Greene’s, which provides clean drinking water in developing countries, as well as a cancer resource center, a Boys and Girls Club, and eight local Jackson Hole charities, among others.
Friess, the wildly successful investor who dabbled in politics in his later years, died May 27 in Scottsdale, Arizona, at age 81, having reportedly given away $500 million over his lifetime to charitable causes. In classic American fashion, all of that started with $800: Friess’s accumulated Army leave pay. He referred to himself as a “Horatio Alger American” in his Twitter biography.
Foster Friess was born April 2, 1940, in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. “I came from nothing,” he once told the New York Times. “My mom dropped out of school in eighth grade to pick cotton and save the family farm. My dad had a high school education.” In his youth, Friess encouraged motels to open their doors to black patrons and was president of his University of Wisconsin fraternity when it accepted its first Jewish member.
He graduated Wisconsin with a degree in business administration and married Lynne in 1962. In 1965, after serving as an intelligence officer with the guided missile brigade in Texas, the couple and the first of their four children moved to Delaware to make something of that $800 in leave pay. Nine years later, he launched his own firm, Friess Associates. Its flagship Brandywine Fund eventually grew to $15 billion.
He invested in media properties as well, his largest being his founding investment in the conservative news site the Daily Caller, which launched in 2010. Two years later, he made a splash as the main donor to the presidential campaign of Rick Santorum, the former senator who surprised many by winning the Iowa caucuses and showing appeal in the Rust Belt before losing the nomination to Mitt Romney. “Foster was just larger than life. He filled up the room when he came in,” Santorum told the Washington Post. “And when he left the room, you felt somehow impacted.”
Friess’s affability never waned during the campaign, and neither did his attention to detail. When Friess went on with Fox Business host Neil Cavuto to talk about his candidate, he began the segment by commenting on a previous topic Cavuto had been covering — he’d clearly been watching the show while waiting for his turn, and he had some information on oil to relay before turning to the topic at hand.
Friess had more success with the next candidate he supported: Donald Trump. Two years later, it was Trump’s turn to back his backer when Friess jumped into the race for Wyoming governor. The endorsement wasn’t enough, though, as Friess lost the nomination to Mark Gordon, who went on to win the governorship.
Friess was diagnosed in September with myelodysplasia, a blood disorder. Bill Sniffin, a friend, described his last visit with Friess in March: “He had already lost 25 pounds and was frail. Yet he wanted to go out to dinner with his friends and he was full of ideas and wanted to hear about projects that were underway,” Sniffin wrote in the Saratoga Sun. “Even during this time, Foster was forward-thinking. What was the next great project? Who needed help?”
Sniffin became publisher of another of Friess’s projects, the Cowboy State Daily, an online statewide news site. He was a “hands-off donor, which made life at the Cowboy State Daily a true pleasure,” Sniffin wrote. Though he did have one section he asked Sniffin to include in the site: “He thought we should run obituaries.”
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
