People who work for Rajiv Shah invariably describe him as ambitious. As president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Shah wants to do as much good as he can for the world, they say. He’s clearly done well for himself.
By the end of 2021, four years into his tenure at the foundation, Shah had become the highest-paid CEO of any big U.S. foundation, with compensation of $1.6 million, according to Rockefeller’s most recent tax return.
Shah’s compensation and leadership style, as well as a previously undisclosed investigation of former Rockefeller board chair Richard Parsons, have together sown discontent among some staff members at the foundation. Others admire the CEO, and it’s impossible for an outsider to know how most staff members feel.
The foundation will not disclose Shah’s current salary, saying it will become public when Rockefeller’s 2023 informational tax return is published in November 2024. “As a policy, we do not get ahead of our 990s,” says Eileen O’Connor, a senior vice president at Rockefeller, referring to the Form 990-PF that private foundations must file each year.
For 2021, Shah’s compensation was $1,614,128. Mark Suzman of the Gates Foundation ($1,361,392), Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation ($1,114,504), and Elizabeth Alexander of the Mellon Foundation ($1,059,864) were the only other foundation chief executives whose compensation exceeded $1 million that year. The Gates, Ford, and Mellon foundations have bigger endowments and give away more money than Rockefeller.
Nevertheless, according to sources at Rockefeller, Shah was given a 2.5 percent bonus along with a 5 percent raise in March. Other staff members got 5 percent raises but not bonuses.
Several months later, the trustees reconvened for a retreat at the Rockefeller-owned Bellagio Center on the shore of Lake Como in Italy. Not just the board members but their spouses were flown to Italy for the event at the foundation’s expense — money, the critics say, that could have gone to charity.
In a statement released by Rockefeller, James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who chairs the board, said: “We are very fortunate to have a sustained high performer and global public figure in Raj Shah, a physician, former … head of USAID and a leader at the Gates Foundation. To meet its mission, the Rockefeller Foundation must be able to call upon and convene heads of state and CEOs, make decisions with hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars on the line, and decipher and explain technical matters. There are not many who fit that bill, but Raj Shah brings a unique and powerful mix of talents and energy to the position. … I have seen and served with remarkable leaders at every level from U.S. presidents to NATO secretary-generals to university presidents and global CEOs, and Raj Shah stands with the very best. We are lucky to have him leading this institution.”
Regarding the spousal travel to Italy, O’Connor said by email that the Bellagio retreats take place every three years and provide “special opportunities for reflection and discussion about our work and broader issues related to the present state of the world — and spouses have long taken part at the expense of the foundation, which is in line with IRS rulings and guidelines.” The Chronicle asked a dozen other big foundations and found that none pay for spouses of trustees to travel to board meetings.
Rockefeller trustees include such bold-faced names as former Unilever CEO Paul Polman; Sharon Percy Rockefeller, head of Washington’s WETA; Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia; Adam Silver, National Basketball Association commissioner; and Patty Stonesifer, the former CEO of the Gates Foundation and interim CEO of the Washington Post.
Controversial Spending
What do experts on foundation say about this? Neither Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, nor Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, would comment about Shah’s pay package, saying they didn’t have enough information to do so. The committee received a grant of $75,000 and the center a grant of $100,000 from Rockefeller in 2021.
Buchanan did say that, as a matter of principle, the boards of foundations (as well as nonprofits and companies) should conduct periodic, rigorous evaluations of the job performance of their chief executives, looking at the effectiveness of programs and their relationships with staff, when possible. They also should commission an “independent benchmarking study against institutions of similar size, scope, and complexity,” he says. By email, O’Connor said: “We do use an outside firm to establish benchmarking, which looks at the kinds of traits that Admiral Stavridis references in his statement.”
The Rockefeller Foundation spent a total of $612.6 million in 2021, including $440.1 million in grants and $142.4 million on administration and operations. In that context, the costs of executive compensation and trustees’ and spousal travel don’t amount to much. But some staff members are rankled by these expenditures and others — the $80 million it cost to renovate Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue headquarters; expensive office space in Washington, D.C., leased for the now-shuttered Pandemic Protection Institute; and payments for dozens of consultants, more than its larger peers such as Ford and Hewlett. (Ford and Hewlett are financial supporters of the Chronicle.) What critics see as wasteful spending comes as the foundation is laying off staff this fall as its health and pandemic-related programs are being restructured.
Current and former employees also complain that the foundation spends a small fortune on communications, in part to burnish Rockefeller’s reputation and Shah’s image. From 2019 to 2022, Rockefeller hired Pushkin Industries, the podcast company co-founded by journalists Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg, to make about 100 episodes of a podcast called Solvable, showcasing big thinkers and their solutions to problems such as climate change and fake news. As Rockefeller prepares for the October launch of Shah’s book Big Bets, those advising the grant maker include several boutique public-relations firms.
“It’s all about chasing the next press release,” complains a former manager at the foundation.
As Rockefeller’s leader, Shah has struggled to win the loyalty of staff. Soon after he was hired, some were displeased when Rockefeller opened an office in Washington because he did not want to move his family to New York. A group of staff members complained to the board, alleging that Shah brought on former colleagues and friends as foundation fellows, spent lavishly on consultants, and mismanaged staff. The board reviewed those charges and found them “without factual basis or merit,” Richard Parsons, the foundation’s then-board chair, told the Chronicle at the time.
Parsons himself then came under investigation in 2021. He was accused by a young woman who worked at the foundation of promising her a job promotion while they were having an intimate relationship. The foundation responded swiftly: Parsons stepped down from the board a month before his term expired, and the board commissioned an independent investigation, led by former attorney general Loretta Lynch of the New York law firm Paul Weiss, which was paid $1.7 million for what the foundation termed “human capital consulting” on its Form 990-PF.
O’Connor said that the Paul Weiss investigation concluded that the foundation had acted appropriately. She declined to say what, if anything, was learned about Parsons’s conduct, so there’s no evidence that he behaved badly. Efforts to reach Parsons through the foundation were unsuccessful.
Some current and former Rockefeller staff members — notably, young women and African American employees — have complained about Shah’s leadership and what they perceive as the foundation’s hierarchical culture and its unpredictable shifts. “I love my job and my colleagues, but the foundation is constantly subject to the whims of our president,” said one. Of course, younger staff members across the nonprofit sector are prone these days to challenge hierarchies and question authority.
Shah makes no apology for the fact that big decisions are made by senior leaders at the foundation. “Our model involves taking significant risks,” he says. “The accountability resides with the board and the leadership.” He’s proud that more than half of the 19 people on the senior leadership team are women or people of color or both.
Many Rockefeller employees admire Shah and respect their colleagues. “There are a lot of really smart people here who are committed to doing the right thing,” says Masha Hamilton, an editor and writer at the foundation.
Those who know him predict bigger things ahead for Shah. He was reported to be the leading candidate to head the World Bank earlier this year, and one friend believes that someday he’ll seek political office in his home state of Michigan. He cut his teeth in politics on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.
“I’m thrilled to be where I am today. I consider it a unique opportunity,” Shah says, when asked about his future. “But it’s always been a dream of mine to be able to serve in the future. We shall see.”
