Greetings and welcome back to The Stratosphere.

Today, a look at some exclusive news from the world of Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder currently ensconced in New Zealand, but whose philanthropic and political whims are creating unease all across the globe.

But first…

• Has Dick Jumped Ship?: One of the Republican Party’s single-biggest donors, Wisconsin shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, is showing signs of interest in Ron DeSantis. Both Dick and his wife, Liz, are expected to be on the host committee for a trio of DeSantis fundraising events in Wisconsin and Illinois on July 11 and July 12, I am told by a source familiar with the matter.

  Liz and Dick, despite their marriage, tend to run their political affairs separately. Liz is seen by the fundraising establishment as less Trumpy than Dick, and so her support for DeSantis isn’t terribly surprising. But Dick’s support is surprising. He is an arch conservative and has been a major supporter of the Club for Growth, and he has a soft spot for conservative longshots. He has been a Trump diehard, backing him with millions in 2020. But his sponsoring of DeSantis when he is fundraising across the Midwest suggests that Dick is at least open-minded to a non-Trump candidate. I hear both Dick and Liz have cut max-out checks to the DeSantis campaign.

Now, I’m told, the more-reclusive-than-ever multi-billionaire is making another major pivot. Omidyar, who is primarily holed up these days in New Zealand, has recently been sending word to the network of organizations that depend on his support that he is planning to scale back his political and philanthropic giving, perhaps dramatically. The network of organizations, part of a constellation called The Omidyar Group, have received almost all of their funding to date from Pierre and his wife, Pam. Without their largesse, these nonprofit and for-profit companies, each of which have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Omidyars over the last decade or two, will possibly be forced to scramble to find alternate funding to remain operational. “The folks I have heard from in several of the orgs are worried, some freaked,” said one person close with leaders at multiple Omidyar groups.

In 2014, he launched a combustible anti-establishment partnership with Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept. Over the following years, one of his flagship political organizations—the Omidyar Network—would become much more avowedly wonky and leftist, spending millions of dollars to successfully amplify the emerging anti-Big Tech backlash. (Omidyar himself also got much more comfortable with dark-money political contributions, although they weren’t really dark because, admirably, he decided to voluntarily disclose his gifts to 501(c)4 groups each year, detailing $106 million in contributions from 2019 to 2022.)

Throughout it all, of course, Pierre was an active strategist behind his groups’ political activities, in addition to its financial principal. His name was literally on the door. The ten organizations that today are part of the Omidyar Group are backed exclusively by Pierre and his wife, each of whom are also the board chairs of several of the groups. Indeed, the Omidyars have donated more than $4 billion to these organizations over the last thirty years. Which is why this latest strategy shift has so many tongues wagging around Silicon Valley.

Early, quiet signs of a pullback were there if you knew where to look. Some Omidyar-backed projects in recent years have been leaning on co-funders more, I hear. And over the last year, several groups within the Omidyar portfolio added new board members, for the first time, with no ties to the Omidyar family, potentially laying the groundwork for new sources of funding to enter the picture, with an appropriate governance structure to manage it. In February, the Omidyar Network added three new members to its Omidyar Group-only board; in April, Humanity United named two new members, after including only Omidyar Group aides until that point; the Democracy Fund did the same thing in April, adding three to the veritable Pierre-fest that was the prior board.

And then just last Wednesday, for instance, Luminate—a foundation previously backed with $155 million from a Pierre Omidyar trust—added three new members to its board, which was previously just Luminate’s C.E.O. and two of Pierre’s inner circle members at the Omidyar Group, Pat Christen and Jeff Alvord. Needless to say, the fact that Luminate’s only source of funding is suddenly at risk was not mentioned in the press release.

Officially, The Omidyar Group says that Pierre and Pam’s commitment to their organizations aren’t changing. “The Omidyars are deeply committed to the TOG organizations, the teams, and their work—their resolve has not changed,” said their nameless aides. I guess we’ll have to see. But overall, the upshot doesn’t look good for Omidyar’s grantees. It was only two years ago that First Look Institute, the Omidyar nonprofit behind The Intercept, added a chief philanthropy officer to raise more money from other donors and work on subscriptions; in January, First Look announced that it was spinning out The Intercept, its flagship publication, as part of a restructuring that involved the site turning to outside funding.

And then there is Omidyar himself. I don’t know all the specifics as to why he is further retrenching from his political and philanthropic activities—Omidyar, with approximately $10 billion in assets, isn’t low on money. But from everything I hear, the French-born Buddhist has become much more reclusive. After making his fortune with eBay, Omidyar drifted between estates in the Las Vegas area and Hawaii. More recently, however, Omidyar has been spending his time even further afield in the Pacific—I hear he and Pam are mostly in New Zealand these days, a notoriously difficult country for foreigners to claim residency. A New Zealand publication reported in late 2021 that Omidyar “is understood to be keen to stay in NZ to learn more about the country​​” after helping to set up a climate lab there. (One of the Omidyar kids lives there too, I’m told.) An ocean away from Silicon Valley, he appears to be in his Howard Hughes era, withdrawing from the world.

That’s not to say the Omidyar groups are doomed. Donors sometimes feel organizations only really develop when they are more sustainable. But change is coming. The Democracy Fund, for instance, Pierre’s democracy-reform nonprofit, has taken in $400 million from Omidyar’s family office over the last decade, and its affiliated 501(c)4 has received at least another $60 million from him. Omidyar also put $200 million or so into First Look Media, $200 million into Imaginable Futures, and $450 million into Humanity United, according to my reading of tax filings. That’s a lot of cash to replace with other donors, particularly on a short time frame. Some downsizing may be inevitable.

This is, of course, the problem inherent to entities solely funded by one billionaire or another. As anyone who worked for Sam Bankman-Fried can tell you: You live by the billionaire, you die by the billionaire. A stroke of a check—hell, a podcast episode that catches the eye of one of the world’s wealthiest people—can uncork millions of dollars and headcount for their passion project. But when the benefactor’s gaze shifts to new horizons, or when they just want to enjoy their mega-yacht, there are real people who have to manage the consequences.