This comment is less well cited than my usual, but perhaps one of the ideas might spark some useful thought:
To learn more about e.g. risks of value drift, risks of expropriation and legal structures, we’re looking into case studies of similar funds, both active now and in the past.
Unfortunately I cannot find the reference, but I seem to recall the Ford Foundation having suffered such severe value drift—far from what Henry Ford intended—that the family basically disowned it.
Creative ideas for optimal governance of the fund
I have heard (though have not verified, so consider this very speculative) that there is a legal structure left over from the crusades (for protecting your castle while you were away in the holy land) that might be useful for cryonics—perhaps it might be of use here.
The foundation was established by Henry Ford II’s father, Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford, in Michigan in 1936, with a gift of twenty-five thousand dollars. At first, it was a small, local foundation funding mostly small, local things. But, after Edsel Ford died, in 1943, and Henry Ford died, in 1947, and willed to the foundation a large chunk of the nonvoting stock of the Ford Motor Company, it became clear that the foundation was going to become, overnight, the largest philanthropic organization in the world. It was not exactly generosity that inspired the gift: if the stock had gone to the Ford children, they would have owed so much in taxes—more than three hundred million dollars—that, in order to pay, they would have had to sell stock in such quantities as to lose control of the company to the public. In addition, Henry and Edsel Ford instructed in their wills that all inheritance taxes—around forty million dollars—be paid by the foundation. Motives notwithstanding, it was a source of bemusement to conservatives ever after that the money made by the arch-conservative Henry Ford, the publisher of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” in a system and spirit of unfettered capitalism, should have fallen into the hands of liberals. When John Olin, the founder of the conservative Olin Foundation, died, in 1982, he decreed that his foundation should not exist in perpetuity, lest it be taken over by the kind of lefty forces that had taken over Ford.
This comment is less well cited than my usual, but perhaps one of the ideas might spark some useful thought:
Unfortunately I cannot find the reference, but I seem to recall the Ford Foundation having suffered such severe value drift—far from what Henry Ford intended—that the family basically disowned it.
I have heard (though have not verified, so consider this very speculative) that there is a legal structure left over from the crusades (for protecting your castle while you were away in the holy land) that might be useful for cryonics—perhaps it might be of use here.
Maybe https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can-buy-profiles-larissa-macfarquhar ?