Timothy Mellon (born July22, 1942) is an American businessman, the grandson of Andrew Mellon, and an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.[1] As of June 2024, Forbes estimated the Mellon family's net worth at $14.1billion.[2] He is a major donor to the Republican Party.
According to Mellon's memoir, he grew up in a Virginia mansion, and a private plane shuttled him to boarding school in Massachusetts.
Mellon attended the Fenn School in Boston, Massachusetts, and Milton Academy.[4] He graduated from Yale University in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in literature.[5][6][7] Mellon then enrolled in Yale Law School but dropped out and instead obtained a degree in city planning from Yale.[8] A May 1971 New York Times article called him "a quiet Yale graduate with two college degrees who has applied computer techniques to city planning".[9]
Career
In the 1960s Mellon founded a software company.[10]
The "Pan Am Clipper Connection", operated by subsidiary Boston-Maine Airways, ceased operations in 2008 after the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) concluded that Boston-Maine's Air Carrier Certificate should be revoked on the basis of lack of financial fitness, poor management oversight, failure to follow federal laws and regulations, and filing false financial data with the department in its application for authority to fly large aircraft.[12]
GTI, renamed Pan Am Railways in 2006, was ultimately sold to the CSX Corporation; the sale closed in June 2022,[13] with the private owners paid $600million;[14] Mellon owned the majority of the company[which?].
Other businesses
In 1999, Mellon purchased the Goodspeed Airport in East Haddam, Connecticut, for $2.33million. In 2020, he sold it to New England Airport Associates, LLC for $891,000.
Mellon has been involved in a number of legal issues, often over relatively small dollar amounts. Testifying in a 2014 civil case, he estimated he had been deposed 15 to 20 times, and that he did not know how many lawsuits he was then involved in.[14]
Search for Amelia Earhart
In 2012, Mellon donated over $1 million to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), a nonprofit organization, to assist its efforts to find Amelia Earhart's plane and remains. In 2013, he sued TIGHAR for racketeering, alleging that it engaged in deceit by soliciting his money to search for Earhart's plane.[17] Mellon claimed that the plane had been found in 2010, before he made his donation.[18]
In 2014, U.S. District Judge Scott W. Skavdahl granted TIGHAR's motion for summary judgment after recognizing that even Mellon's own experts were unable to confirm his allegations about the 2010 photographs that he claimed showed the plane. Skavdahl concluded:
Defendants represented to Plaintiff they were planning another expedition in their continued quest to find the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. Upon reading about Defendants' efforts, Plaintiff contacted Defendants and expressed his interest in supporting the expedition with a monetary contribution. That's exactly what the parties then did. No false representations were made. Regardless, no rational trier of fact could find Defendants falsely represented they had not found Earhart's plane by embarking on another expedition in hopes of finding conclusive evidence to prove it. No matter how convinced or sincere Plaintiff is in his subjective belief and opinion that Amelia Earhart's airplane was or should have been discovered prior to the making of his donation, that belief and opinion is insufficient to create a genuine dispute of material fact.[19]
Mellon appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which affirmed the district court's ruling without holding oral argument. The Tenth Circuit concluded that the lack of actionable falsity precluded Mellon's claims.[20]
Politics
Political donations
Mellon gave $227million to federal candidates and political committees from January 2020 through June 2024, nearly all of it to Republicans.[14] As of August 2024, he had donated $165million in the 2024 elections.[21]
2010–2021
In 2010, Mellon donated $1.5million to Arizona's defense fund to help cover the costs of legal challenges against Arizona SB1070,[22] the broadest and strictest anti-illegal immigration measure in the U.S. at the time of its passage.[23][1] It received national and international attention and spurred considerable controversy.[24][25]
In the 2018 election cycle, Mellon was a major political donor, especially to the Republican-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund.[26] In April 2020, he donated $10million to Donald Trump's super PAC America First Action.[1] According to OpenSecrets, in 2020 and 2022, he was the 6th- and 5th-most prolific donor in the U.S., spending $60million and $47million, respectively, to support Republican candidates and causes.[27]
In the second quarter of 2023, Mellon donated $5million to American Values 2024, a super PAC affiliated with the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; that, together with a large donation from billionaire Gavin de Becker, accounted for 97% of donations the PAC received through the end of June 2023.[29] By March 2024, Mellon's donations to the PAC totaled $20million,[30] and by July 2024 it had increased to $25million.[14]
Between April 2023 and March 2024, Mellon donated $15million to MAGA Inc. (Make America Great Again), a Trump super PAC.[30] On May31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, Mellon gave MAGA Inc. $50million, one of the largest disclosed donations ever.[31][32] By July 2024, Mellon had given $75million toward supporting Trump's campaign,[14] and by October, the total amount donated to the PAC had reached $150 million.[33]
Political views
Mellon's self-published autobiography, announced in 2016, described his political views.[34][35] He calls social safety net programs "Slavery Redux", adding:
For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cellphones, WIC [the U.S. Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children] payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.
In 1984, Mellon wrote:
Something had obviously gone dreadfully wrong with the Great Society and the Liberal onslaught. Poor people had become no less poor. Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the "Establishment" to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations.... Drugs rose to the level of epidemic. Single parent families became more and more prevalent. The likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pandered endlessly to fan the flames.[34][32]
