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Margaret Cargill

1920–2006 · 86 years Specialist

The Cargill heiress who insisted her giving stay anonymous

Cargill was born into the country's largest private company without ever taking a role in running it. Her father and older brother sat as Cargill Inc. executives while she attended Stephens College for a year, then earned a degree in arts education at the University of Minnesota, and moved on to New York to work as a manuscript editor. She never married or had children. By the 1990s she had settled in La Jolla, California, partly, friends said, because so few people there recognized the Cargill name, and filled her days with folk art, weaving, camping trips, and a poodle named Kari who outlasted most of the human company in the stories people later told about her.

Cargill began giving money away quietly in 1995, through a small vehicle called the Akaloa Resource Foundation, and a year later set up the Anne Ray Charitable Trust, named for her mother, as her main channel. Over the following decade she moved roughly 200 million dollars through the two funds — to the American Red Cross, the Nature Conservancy, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and disabled-children's programs in Russia — almost always on condition her name not be attached. Few recipients knew who was paying. When she died in 2006, her will routed the bulk of her fortune, tied up in privately held Cargill Inc. stock nobody outside the family could easily value, into a third fund created in her name. What that stock turned out to be worth is most of the rest of this story.

The scale that eventually made Cargill's name public only became visible after she had lost any say in it. Her estate held Cargill Inc. shares nearly impossible to value while the company stayed private, and a 2011 restructuring tied to a fast-growing fertilizer subsidiary, Mosaic, revealed the real number: close to 9 billion dollars, roughly 40 times the 200 million she had given away by hand over the previous 15 years. The foundations now run a fortune many times larger than any she personally managed, guided only by grant patterns she set while giving in the low millions. A woman who built her adult life around not being recognized has her name on one of the ten largest philanthropies in the country, doing the kind of visible, branded giving she spent her own life declining to do.

Cargill died on August 1, 2006, in La Jolla, at 85, of complications from chronic lung disease — some records give the date as August 2. The Margaret A. Cargill Foundation and the Anne Ray Foundation, unified since 2016 under the name Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, together hold more than 9 billion dollars and rank among the ten largest foundations in the country, funding disaster relief, the arts, the environment and animal welfare largely by invitation rather than open application — a grantmaking style built to preserve the low profile she kept while she was alive.

Lifespan

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Margaret Cargill's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Akaloa Resource Foundation company
Her first, quietly funded philanthropic vehicle 1995
Anne Ray Charitable Trust company
Named for her mother; the primary channel for her lifetime giving 1996
Margaret A. Cargill Foundation company
Created by her will; now holds billions in combined assets with the Anne Ray Foundation 2006
Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies company
Umbrella name unifying the foundations' grantmaking across seven program areas 2016

Life in brief

with age at each point

September 24, 1920 aged 0 Born in Los Angeles, California
1995 aged ~75 Establishes the Akaloa Resource Foundation, her first philanthropic vehicle
1996 aged ~76 Creates the Anne Ray Charitable Trust, named for her mother
August 1, 2006 aged 85 Dies in La Jolla, California, at 85
2006 aged ~86 The Margaret A. Cargill Foundation is created under her will
2011 aged ~91 A Cargill Inc. and Mosaic stock restructuring reveals her estate is worth nearly 9 billion dollars
2016 aged ~96 Her foundations unify under the name Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies