What kind of man spends $100 million on the 2024 presidential race — only to become the top donor to two candidates, men who are supposed to be rivals?
Timothy Mellon is a scion of one of America’s great family fortunes. He’s uber-rich, infamously reclusive, and stubbornly litigious. He’s fascinated by Amelia Earhart and Patsy Cline, both of whom perished in air crashes. He’s a crusader against illegal immigration, has written that Black Americans are “belligerent,” and likens the social safety net to a modern form of “slavery” that Republicans must smash.
Mellon is also so committed to electing Donald Trump that he’s also underwriting the presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — apparently confident that the fellow blue blood with an iconic name can undermine support for the Democratic ticket.
Mellon, who is in his early 80s and resides in Wyoming, is notoriously press shy. Rolling Stone reached him briefly by phone. Mellon speaks softly, with precise, patrician diction, but he would not agree to discuss his political giving. The MAGA megadonor’s cash, however, speaks volumes. Mellon has steered $75 million to the Trump-backing Super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc., making him by far Trump’s top political patron of the 2024 cycle. This extreme giving builds on Mellon’s support for Trump in the 2020 election, when he donated at least $20 million to America First Action, another Trumpy Super PAC
There’s no confusion about which team Mellon bats for. Over recent election cycles, he has emerged as one of the GOP’s principal plutocrats. In 2024, he is tied with Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass at $10 million as the top donor to the Super PAC that backs GOP House candidates, the Congressional Leadership Fund. In the 2020 cycle, he gave at least $30 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which boosts GOP senate candidates. For 2024, he ranks as the largest donor by far, at $4 million, to the Sentinel Action Fund, which was launched by the far-right Heritage Foundation to back “conservative champions,” including Ohio GOP senate candidate Bernie Moreno.
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Famed for his unregulated donations to Super PACs, Mellon has also made hard money campaign contributions to such MAGA mavens as Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina. This pattern of giving to controversial, far-right Republicans stretches back decades, including a gift to 2000 Bush/Gore recount villain, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, when she first ran for Congress in 2002.
Mellon has also steered vast sums to Republican causes outside of the confines of electoral politics. In 2021, he gave more than $50 million to fund a pet project by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for the state of Texas to build its own border wall, according to public documents obtained by Texas Tribune and shared with Rolling Stone. More than a decade ago, Mellon also wrote a seven-figure check to help Jan Brewer, then Arizona’s Republican governor, defend state legislation that tried to empower state cops to demand papers of those they profiled as undocumented immigrants.
In the context of this extravagant giving to Republicans, Mellon’s current support for the independent Kennedy 2024 ticket has all the hallmarks of an op. Mellon has given $25 million to the Kennedy boosting Super PAC American Values 2024, which is pushing to get Kennedy on the ballot in pivotal swing states including Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, and has promised to spend millions on TV ads.
The Democratic National Committee is not shy about describing Kennedy’s relationship with Mellon. “His candidacy is being propped up by Donald Trump’s largest donor,” says DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni. “RFK Jr.’s candidacy satisfies one goal: being a spoiler for Donald Trump.” Polls have consistently shown Trump has a “low ceiling” of support among U.S. voters, topping out in the 40s. But a well-funded Kennedy candidacy could cleave off a chunk of Democratic voters, and enable Trump to skate back into the White House without anything close to majority backing.
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In a statement by Mellon, released by American Values 2024, the GOP donor has touted Kennedy as uniquely situated to “win the general election” and as “the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption.” This contrasts with public reporting that Mellon was first attracted to donate to Kennedy because Mellon saw him as a “kooky Biden botherer,” to quote a Puck columnist. The Wall Street Journal has cited Republican sources who view Mellon’s cash to Kennedy as a means to create “chaos” for Biden.
It is vital to underscore that Mellon has a trollish streak — and a self-professed habit of donating to politicians he believes hurt Democratic prospects. In a rare interview with Bloomberg, in 2020, Mellon admitted that a $2,700 contribution he’d made to the House campaign of then-upstart progressive New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was intended to boost a politician whose lefty politics Mellon believed could wrongfoot mainstream Democrats. When AOC’s campaign tried to return the donation, Mellon bragged of foiling that too — insisting he’d “neither cash nor deposit the check but rather, frame it.”
Mellon has also previously offered financial support to Democrats who are notorious for being thorns in the side of party leadership, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who have consistently succeeded in downsizing Democratic policy ambitions (and are now both independents). Mellon also donated to Tulsi Gabbard when she was running as a Democrat for president in 2019; Gabbard has since become such a MAGA stalwart that she reportedly made the shortlist for Trump’s VP. Indeed, Kennedy himself earlier sparked chatter about being a possible Trump veep pick — talk that Mellon himself encouraged to the New York Post, saying: “I’ve heard the concept. It’s not surprising.”
Kennedy, for his part, has spoken of meeting Mellon twice. He characterized Mellon’s intentions to an interviewer in May: “I think Tim Mellon would prefer me to be president of the United States because he thinks that I would make a better president.” But Kennedy added that, “if I’m not going to be president he would prefer President Trump to President Biden.”
As a practical matter, it’s unclear why Mellon would spend three times as much money backing his second choice candidate, Trump. Regardless, Kennedy has lavished praise on Mellon, offering a cover blurb for the donor’s forthcoming autobiography, touting Mellon a “maverick entrepreneur” and an “industrial genius.”
Kennedy and Mellon share a book publisher, Tony Lyons, who is, in fact, also steering American Values 2024. Lyons, in an interview with Rolling Stone, rejected the notion that Mellon is propping up Kennedy to benefit Trump. “Tim Mellon is a true patriot — principled, sincere, fiercely independent,” Lyons says. “He obviously hates political corruption and he’s backed candidates across the political spectrum, often right after they were subjected to censorship, hit pieces, lawfare, or anti-democratic political games.”
Lyons points out that Mellon cut a huge check to MAGA Inc. after Trump’s felony convictions, and that one of his checks to the Kennedy-backing American Values 2024 came after Kennedy was grilled in Congress over statements he made about Covid-19 being “targeted” to spare the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.
“Calling him a spoiler or stalking horse, and saying that people would donate to him to hurt somebody else, doesn’t make sense,” Lyons insists, pointing to polls that have suggested that Kennedy could defeat either Biden or Trump in a head-to-head contest. Lyons spoke to Rolling Stone before allegations broke in a Vanity Fair piece that Kennedy years ago sexual assaulted a family babysitter or that he ate a grilled canine. (Kennedy has denied eating dog. He sidestepped allegations of sexual impropriety, saying he was not running as a “church boy.”)
Although Timothy Mellon funding a self-styled populist in Trump and a disruptive insurgent in Kennedy, he is as establishment as they come. He was born into one of America’s wealthiest dynasties — the grandson of Andrew Mellon, who built the family’s banking fortune in the age of the robber barons, providing venture capital to companies like Gulf Oil and Alcoa. The Mellons have long had a role in politics, as well. Andrew Mellon was Treasury secretary during the Roaring Twenties, championing laissez-faire economic policies that eventually steered America into the ditch of the Great Depression.
The precise magnitude of Tim Mellon’s net worth is unclear. The chroniclers of great wealth in America continue to lump him in with his clan; Forbes puts the Mellon family fortune at $14 billion — good for 34th on its 2024 list of America’s richest families. Of Tim Mellon, specifically, Forbes recently reported: “He only appears to be worth about $1 billion.”
The Mellons and the Kennedys, meanwhile, have a long history. Mellon’s stepmother, the Listerine heiress Bunny Mellon, was a close confidante of Jacqueline Kennedy, and continued to play a role in Democratic politics, including through the bizarre John Edwards love-child scandal of the aughts.
Befitting his silver-spoon upbringing, Mellon attended the private Milton Academy and graduated from Yale. For a time he seemed like he might emerge as an iconoclast. As a young man interested in computers and urban planning, he was described by The New York Times as the most “un Mellon‐like” of his generation. Mellon funded liberal social policy through a charity called the Sachem Fund, which helped launch a feminist law practice, and reportedly sought to “tackle problems of race, poverty, and environmental despoliation.” Mellon even wrote a letter to the Times in 1970 critiquing Milton Friedman’s economics of greed, writing that responsible shareholders should seek to “maximize our overall economic and social portfolio” rather than pure profits, and that Mellon’s stance was not, contra Friedman, a form of “pure unadulterated socialism.”
But by the Reagan years, Mellon’s progressive streak had reversed polarity, and he’s occupied a right-wing orbit ever since. In a version of his autobiography that he self-published in 2015, Mellon let loose with extremist views. In excerpts quoted by the Washington Post in 2020, Mellon wrote that the modern safety net was “slavery redux,” and alleged that Black Americans had become “even more belligerent” and “unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations” since the Great Society programs of the LBJ era.
Mellon went so far as to argue that Americans who rely on government assistance — including “freebies” like “food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare” — have become “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.” Mellon blamed academia for introducing “a mishmash of meaningless tripe” — not limited to “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies” — that has been used to “brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome.” Invoking the spirit of Abraham Lincoln in abolishing chattel slavery, Mellon insisted the GOP’s job was now to “deal with the contemporary counterpart.”
Mellon’s book — which had been available for a download in exchange for a modest donation to organizations like the far-right Hillsdale College and a legal foundation named to honor Ronald Reagan — almost immediately disappeared after the Post story ran. However, Mellon told Bloomberg of his book that he stood by his diatribe and insisted: “I don’t have any regrets.” A new version of Mellon’s book, Panam.Captain, is due to be released later this month; Lyons tells Rolling Stone it’s “a very similar book” to the 2015 volume.
Mellon was born rich enough to be a man of leisure. But he instead set about on a career as a throw-back industrialist. He began acquiring regional railroads in New England in the 1980s. The company’s branding, Guilford Transportation Industries, was never sexy. And Mellon, who knows a thing or two about legacy brands, purchased the rights to PanAm after the legendary air carrier went bust. Mellon, himself a pilot, attempted to branch out into operating an airline under the PanAm logo. But this proved to be one of his many sideways ventures — see also a cursed career as a West-Texas cattleman — and he eventually just slapped the PanAm branding on his rail lines. The rail venture was sold to CSX for $600 million in 2022. Mellon now lists his profession on FEC filings as “self employed.”
Like many rich men, Mellon has eccentric and expensive hobbies. One of them has been trying to locate the wreckage of the last flight of Amelia Earhart. Mellon donated $1 million in 2012 to a group searching for Earhart’s lost Electra aircraft that disappeared in 1937 during an attempted trip around the globe. But as he got involved in the project, Mellon became convinced he’d been duped — and that the exploration group known as TIGHAR, or the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, had already located the plane in 2010, but was still milking rich folks for money on needless explorations.
Mellon sued TIGHAR in federal court in 2013, alleging that underwater video footage collected by TIGHAR revealed the wreckage. Mellon lost in court, with the judge upbraiding him: “Plaintiff has no more than theories and opinions that Earhart’s plane, or parts of it, are depicted in the 2010 footage.” The judge added that Mellon’s “belief and opinion is insufficient” to create a legal claim. Mellon also lost on appeal in the 10th Circuit, which noted that Mellon’s own experts “would not confirm” at trial “that the footage proved the plane had been found.”
That hasn’t stopped Mellon from pursuing his case in public, however. He funded a pair of scientific papers attempting to prove, scientifically, that his theory is correct. Mellon was listed as a co-author on the papers, one of which includes a note to “thank Timothy Mellon for funding this project, and for his insights into aviation and his deep knowledge surrounding Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.”
With Mellon, there seems to be a fascination about the tragic death of women in airplanes. Mellon is also an enthusiast of Patsy Cline — the legendary pop/country singer who was killed in a plane crash in 1963. Mellon has bought up properties around Cline’s childhood home and is creating an elaborate memorial and park in Winchester, Virginia.
At times, Mellon has flashed the entitlement of wealth. He owns a small airport in Connecticut, where to create better clearance for landing planes, he ordered the clear cutting of a stand of trees in a protected wetlands and bald eagle habitat that did not belong to him. Then-state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal blasted Mellon for having “flagrantly disregarded the state’s environmental laws” and sued in him 2002 — and won in 2005, forcing Mellon to pay significant fines to the state environmental agency,
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Mellon owns dozens of properties in Wyoming, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, but appears to make his home in Saratoga, Wyoming, where he owns a multi-million dollar home on nearly five acres. Mellon is famously reclusive, reportedly eschewing big GOP donor events, even in nearby Jackson Hole, and communicates only by fax with some of his political associates. When Mellon wanted to make his massive gift to Abbott’s Texas border wall, he wrote a message via a portal on the governor’s website. The message, contained in the Texas Tribune records, reads: “I need assistance in making a substantial contribution to the wall project with Texas municipal bonds. 8 figures.”
Former labor secretary Robert Reich paints this scion of Mellon family wealth — the heir of an heir — as a poster boy of America’s failed political and economic system: “Timothy Mellon is the product of a tax system pioneered by his grandfather,” Reich writes, “that allows the perpetuation of dynastic wealth and the maintenance of its political power.”
