Instead of flitting around the world in extended retirement or writing donation checks, today’s titans are giving their time, talent and treasure to build passion projects around the world. Here’s a look at five power players — and where they’re focusing their fortunes.
The Region Builder: Alex Vik
Home base: Monaco
Age: 62
Day job: The Swedish-Norwegian-Uruguayan Vik has made billions on tech startups, sovereign funds, insurance companies — you name it.
Passion: Harvard-educated Vik and his college-sweetheart wife, Carrie, fell in love with Uruguay and revolutionized high-style/low-impact tourism in the country with two game-changing hotels, planting the city of José Ignacio squarely on the Gypset map. Emboldened, they then set out to create a world-class wine destination in Chile.
Project: To create his Viña Vik retreat, Vik hired world-class winemakers from storied chateaux to dig 4,000 soil wells, test wind conditions, source root stock and grid 12 Chilean valleys across 11,000 acres to optimize each planting. A 22-room hotel and architecturally significant winery welcome guests to the secluded Millahue region of Chile, now a proper wine destination just two hours from Santiago.
ROI: The Viks are champions of local creatives — each Viña Vik suite comes with its own vivid art (artists sometimes live on-site), and the couple even built an extension at Estancia Vik (in Uruguay) to accommodate a massive commission. They’ve also pushed the boundaries of environmentally sustainable winemaking, incorporating permeable fabric roofing, solar panels and natural cooling systems that take advantage of the thermal amplitude of the valleys.
What’s next: The Viks hope to score 100 points from independent wine experts (some of their blends have already scored 94 to 97). “Some people say it’s arrogant, but we are trying to do something that hasn’t been done before,” Vik tells Alexa. “With the hotel and winery, now travelers to Chile don’t just go to Santiago and Patagonia; they also come to [Millahue].”
Kindred spirit: Analjit Singh, an Indian billionaire tycoon who’s developed high-end vineyards, hotels, restaurants and even a hospital in the bucolic town of Franschhoek, South Africa.
The Curator: J. Tomilson Hill
Hill is converting part of the Getty, at 239 10th Ave., into an art foundation.
Home base: New York City
Age: 68
Day job: Vice chairman of private-equity firm Blackstone Group
Passion: Collecting contemporary art “in depth,” with no fewer than four pieces from individual artists, including Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Agnes Martin.
Project: Rather than donate his $800 million art collection to a museum, Hill convinced real-estate developer Michael Shvo to convert 6,400 square feet of his new building, the Getty on 10th Avenue, into a private gallery. “The Met needs everything I’ve got,” he has boasted, adding: “I’m not into wings; I’m into art.”
ROI: When it’s completed this fall, the two-story Hill Art Foundation, designed by leather-clad architect Peter Marino, will be open to the public (with free admission) on Saturdays and offer special programming to public-school students whose art curriculum has been slashed.
What’s next: The foundation is working on a partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Met (where Hill sits on the board) to create educational programming for students.
Kindred spirits: Financier Glenn Fuhrman and his FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea; oil baron Andrew Hall’s art foundation near Hanover, Germany.
The Thinker: Nicolas Berggruen
Home base: Los Angeles
Age: 55
Day job: Recovered investor
Passion: Finding solutions to big global issues — democracy, geopolitics, philanthropy — through innovative thinking.
Project: The Berggruen Institute, a cross-cultural community of professors, politicians, Nobel Laureates and business leaders who deep-dive on global fixes. “We are more about the depths of the ideas as opposed to the quantity of the ideas,” the single father of twins tells Alexa.
ROI: So far, the institute hasworked to change California’s flawed voter-referendum system, launched the globally minded WorldPost vertical with Huffington Post and awarded its first-annual Berggruen Prize for “deep intellectual work.”
What’s next: Berggruen has amassed 450 acres above the Getty Museum and hired architectural firm Herzog + de Meuron to design something like a secular monastery — a physical space for all that free-form thinking.
Kindred spirit: George Soros, the legendary investor and philanthropist whose Open Society Foundations work to advance civil justice, education, health and independent media around the globe.
The Art Whisperer: Pamela Joyner
Home base: San Francisco
Age: 59
Day job: Founder of Avid Partners, a strategic-marketing consulting firm
Passion: Collecting postwar and contemporary work from African-American artists and those from the global African diaspora. (“Which was a challenge at the dawn of the civil-rights movement, when the traditional art world wanted easily accessible blackness,” the Harvard grad tells Alexa.)
Project: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art is composed of over 300 works by artists of African descent. Pieces from Joyner and husband Fred Giuffrida’s collection have been loaned to London’s Tate Modern; over the next three years, a portion of the collection will tour the US, with its first stint at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans next fall.
ROI: By loaning her works and publishing a book — “Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art” — Joyner is re-framing these marginalized artists in the broader canon of art history.
What’s next: The couple recently inaugurated an artist-residency program at their 6-acre estate in Sonoma.
Kindred spirit: Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, whose privately owned Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami champions Latin-American artists.
The Idea Incubator: Brad Keywell
Home base: Chicago
Age: 47
Day job: Co-founder of Groupon; co-founder/CEO of Uptake, a predictive analytics platform
Passion: Opening ideas conferences to everyone — not just the ultra-wealthy.
Project: Six years ago, Keywell was crisscrossing the country to attend the extremely exclusive (and pricey) Aspen Institute and Renaissance Weekend retreats, when he had the idea for Chicago Ideas Week (CIW). He called on friends like Wes Craven, Bill Clinton and Deepak Chopra, who all agreed to speak in small Windy City conference rooms — with guests paying no more than $15 a ticket.
ROI: Last October’s CIW drew 30,000 attendees for more than 200 events. “We put our conference in one of the world’s great cities and flipped the model to make it deliberately diverse and accessible,” says Keywell.
What’s next: Easier access via a podcast and year-round programming.
Kindred spirits: Tim O’Reilly and his Foo Camp (the “wiki of conferences”); Chris Anderson, the brains behind TED.