Unicef Has a Growing Circle of Ultra-Wealthy Individuals on Tap
4 min
During the Covid pandemic in 2021, Silicon Valley venture capitalist John O’Farrell organised a call with several tech CEOs to urge them to back Unicef’s efforts to distribute vaccines globally as he and his wife, Gloria Principe, were doing.
Stewart Butterfield , co-founder and—at the time—the CEO of Slack, and his wife, Jen Rubio , co-founder and CEO of Away, “gave US$25 million on the spot,” and challenged other tech CEOs to give, too, says Kristen Jones, Unicef’s fundraising manager, global philanthropy.
O’Farrell is on the national board of the organisation and a member of the Unicef International Council, a network of 150 wealthy individuals from 22 countries.
“We were trying to mobilise resources really quickly,” Jones says. In this instance, an International Council member showed how the “influence and trust” of individuals and their network can be extended to Unicef and its mission.
Courtesy of Unicef
Unicef, officially the United Nations Children’s Fund, is a U.N. agency focused on humanitarian and developmental aid to children. It relies on funding from governments and intergovernmental agencies. But it also depends on the private sector, from US$1 gifts provided by individuals across the world to giving by corporations, foundations, and wealthy donors.
Total giving to Unicef from the private sector totalled US$2.07 billion last year, representing 23% of total revenue, according to its annual report. Of that total, US$829 million was unrestricted—money that is particularly valuable because it’s flexible.
“That funding is critical for us to be able to cover underfunded operations, emergencies or situations of armed conflict that are not in the headlines anymore,” says Carla Haddad Mardini, director of Unicef’s division of private fundraising and partnerships.
The International Council was formed in 2017 not only to boost private-sector donations, but to create a powerful group of individuals who could bring their knowledge, expertise, vision, and networks to the organisation, Haddad Mardini says.
“We don’t see them as donors, we see them as partners,” she says.
That’s because the council’s engagement with Unicef goes behind giving. “They support by opening their networks to us, thinking with us about the global problems that make children more vulnerable,” Haddad Mardini says. “It’s invaluable in terms of the advocacy that they do and the influence that they exert.”
The council, of course, also provides needed funding. Since it was formed, members—who give US$1 million when they join—have donated more than US$552 million.
This past year, the council brought on 15 new members, half from countries in the Southern Hemisphere, including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mexico. The incoming chair is Muhammed Aziz Khan, founder and chairman of the Summit Group, a Bangladesh industrial conglomerate, whose foundation is focused on the education of vulnerable children in the country.
“We want this group to be as diverse as possible,” Haddad Mardini says. “They’re not there for their own visibility, they are there to really meaningfully and purposefully make a difference.”
Bernard Taylor, an arbitrator and mediator at Judicial Arbitration and Mediation ADR Services and a retired partner with Alston & Bird, an Atlanta-based international law firm, has been an active supporter of Unicef for years, joining its Southeast Regional Board in the U.S. in 2007. In 2018, he joined the council and this past summer, became chair of the organisation’s National Board.
One of Taylor’s earliest experiences with Unicef was a trip to Madagascar not long after the island in the southwest Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa had been hit by successive cyclones.
“It was really eye-opening from the standpoint of seeing the despair that so many people were living through and that the children were living through,” Taylor says. After returning home and taking his children on a trip to the local mall to buy supplies for a school project, he was overwhelmed by the abundance that surrounded them.
“Just a short plane ride away, people were living in despair and death—we had to do something about that, and what I saw was that Unicef was doing something about it,” he says. “That’s how I got involved and committed.”
Often, the council responds to emergencies such as the urgent need for global vaccine distribution during the pandemic. In 2022, the council raised US$3.2 million to support Unicef’s work in Afghanistan, and another US$5.5 million in response to the war in Ukraine.
But as Haddad Mardini says, the council also goes beyond check-writing.
“We are all focused on pulling together our resources, our expertise,
our networks,” Taylor says. “As a private philanthropy, we’re able to be nimble, to be fast and flexible in ways that can address the issues that Unicef is struggling with. As a council member, I’m able to utilise my influence with peers and business leaders and even governmental entities.”
Recently, he spoke with one of Georgia’s U.S. senators to inform him about Unicef’s activities and to get his support. “Maybe you would call us extenders of influence—we increase, substantially, the influence and the ability of Unicef to do its work.”
The experience of Taylor, O’Farrell and others as private sector executives can also be influential to the thinking of Unicef’s executives, Jones says.
“They’re bringing their private sector experience and what they’re seeing in their partnerships,” she says. “It’s a space where they feel comfortable being very open and candid. It’s a nice dialogue with leadership.”
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
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