By Svea Herbst-Bayliss
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin, who started his hedge fund in his dormitory at Harvard University, is donating $300 million to his alma mater, raising the total amount of his gifts to the Ivy League university to more than half a billion dollars.
The gift, which is unrestricted, is earmarked for the university's 150-year-old Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), which oversees the undergraduate program as well as all PhD programs plus athletics, museums and libraries.
"Ken's exceptional generosity and steadfast devotion enable excellence and opportunity at Harvard," Harvard President Larry Bacow said in a statement. FAS will be renamed the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Griffin, who graduated from Harvard College in 1989 and later founded hedge fund Citadel and market-making firm Citadel Securities, has a net worth of $35 billion, according to Forbes.
In 2014 he donated $150 million to Harvard, making what remains the single largest gift to undergraduate financial aid. He has also given to the university's business, law and education schools and established a scholarship in honor of his grandfather.
Griffin's total philanthropic giving is approaching $2 billion.
Harvard is one of the world's richest universities, with an endowment of $51 billion at the end of fiscal 2022. It previously received a $500 million gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg for an artificial intelligence institute and $400 million from hedge fund investor John Paulson for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
After beginning to bet on convertible bonds while living at the university's Cabot (NYSE:CBT) House, Griffin went on to found Miami-based Citadel, one of the world's biggest and most successful hedge funds, which earned a record $16 billion profit in 2022.