"The more we give away," Sir John Templeton once wrote in The New York Times, "the more we have left."
By that formulation--indeed, no matter how you calculate it--Sir John has a lot left. In 1992 he sold the Templeton Funds, worth roughly $80 billion, to the Franklin Group in a deal that netted him more than $900 million. At age 86 he is working 60-hour weeks from the same three-story office building he built in the Bahamas when he was running the Templeton Funds. But his work has taken on a different aim?
Templeton has created three foundations and is now giving away ten dollars for every dollar he spends on himself.
Born in Tennessee in 1912, Templeton worked his way through Yale during the Great Depression before taking a job on Wall Street. Before long, he had opened his own firm, and in 1954, he started Templeton Growth Fund. He went on to found such successful investment funds as Templeton World Fund, pioneering, in the process, the field of individual investing in emerging markets.
Knighted Sir John in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth II, Templeton is a British subject and not one to take tax planning lightly. While best known for the John Templeton Foundation in Radnor, Pennsylvania (assets $235 million), his two offshore trusts bring the total dedicated to philanthropy to about $800 million. |
