Timothy Mellon is the top donor to both Donald Trump and RFK Jr., two competing presidential candidates, which is just one reason he is unlike any political donor in history.
By Phoebe Liu and Zach Everson, Forbes Staff
The biggest donor in American politics today doesn’t talk to reporters much, deriding the press as “the propaganda arm of the federal government and the bureaucracy.” So it came as little surprise when Timothy Mellon, a Gilded Age heir who has emerged as a modern power player, largely ignored a series of questions sent to him asking about his family, background and political philosophy. Mellon responded with only a URL, linking to a story about an airplane flying over the Hamptons, where Biden was hosting a post-debate fundraiser, with a one-word trailer behind it:
“BI-DONE!”
Mellon has 76.5 million reasons to gloat in the wake of Biden’s disastrous debate performance. No one has spent more trying to reinstall Trump in the White House. Linda McMahon, the WWE mogul who served in Trump’s cabinet, has given the second-most of any donor, $11.1 million, or about one-seventh as much as Mellon. Forty-three percent of all money that has gone into Trump’s main super-PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has come from the 81-year-old heir.
Even more remarkable: Mellon is dumping in that much money without the kind of fortune that allows other billionaires—think Bloomberg or Adelson—to give away hundreds of millions without blinking. While those tycoons hold stakes in cash-gushing businesses worth tens of billions of dollars, Forbes thinks Mellon could be worth close to $1 billion, based on his inheritance and proceeds from the sale of his railroad company. He insists his fortune is even smaller: “Billionaire NOT!” he responded in another brusque email. “Never have been, never will be.” In any case, it’s a remarkably modest sum, considering he has given federal political committees a total of $237 million, plus at least another $60 million to state candidates and the border wall.
Timothy Mellon and his first wife Susan Tracy Mellon attend a party in 1981—the year Guilford Transportation Industries was founded—to honor the National Gallery established by Mellon's grandfather.
Guy DeLort/WWD/Penske Media/Getty ImagesDespite being the grandson of banking titan Andrew Mellon, Timothy Mellon has earned a surprising amount of his money himself. His father used the family fortune to enjoy a life in aristocracy, devoting enough time to horses that he became a member of the national racing Hall of Fame. Timothy Mellon, by contrast, went to work, borrowing from the Mellon Bank to buy three struggling railroads in the early 1980s and building them over four decades into a $600 million empire. “I have never been without a comfortable financial cushion,” he wrote in a 2015 memoir, “although I have always felt the need to use my brainpower to augment what I started with.”
He kept grinding until a month before his 80th birthday in 2022, when he finally cashed out and turned his attention more fully toward elections. Mellon’s political philosophy has shifted over the years, but he has always strayed from the crowd. Coming from a family of Republican royalty—his grandfather served as treasury secretary for three Republican presidents—Timothy lurched left as a young man, routing money to causes backed by Gloria Steinem and Ralph Nader. When he got into the railroad business, employees demanded support of their unions—he went to war with them instead. More recently, he has not only spent mind-bending sums supporting Donald Trump, but he also has poured $25 million into Robert F. Kennedy’s super-PAC, contributing more than half of its revenue.
Mellon may not be answering questions much these days, but in a rare interview with Forbes 36 years ago, he offered a window into his worldview. “If you believe in something,” he said, “what others call you is irrelevant.”
H
eir to an heir, Timothy Mellon never had to wonder whether his family had money. The fortune began with his great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant named Thomas Mellon, who started a Pittsburgh banking empire shortly after the Civil War. Thomas eventually welcomed his children into the business, including Andrew, Timothy’s grandfather. Andrew invested in companies like Gulf Oil, a predecessor to Chevron, before serving in the cabinets of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. He left a reported $22.7 million in 1930-something dollars–equivalent to roughly $500 million today—for his three grandchildren, including Timothy. Andrew Mellon also left enough for his son, Paul Mellon, to live a life of luxury, in which he obsessed over horses and penned an autobiography titled Reflections in a Silver Spoon. It’s unclear how much Paul Mellon left to Timothy and his sister, though he bequeathed $110 million to his second wife, according to a book by Meryl Gordon, and left more than $200 million to charity.
Andrew Mellon (center), Timothy Mellon's grandfather, served as treasury secretary for Calvin Coolidge (left) and Herbert Hoover (right). During his terms, he helped lower taxes on businesses and the wealthy.
Keystone/Getty ImagesDespite the wealth, Timothy Mellon faced challenges in childhood. His mother died when he was four. Mellon said he was told that his sister did not speak to him for the first five years of his life. He attended private school in Massachusetts, then headed to Yale, where his father had studied literature and donated millions. Timothy took to political science, graduating in 1964, then headed to Yale Law School, where he lasted less than a week, intimidated by the professors (“sheer terror,” he wrote in his autobiography). His fallback: Another Yale degree, this time in city planning. Mellon drove a fancy blue Gulf truck but did not flaunt his wealth. One classmate, Emily Nugent Carrier, remembers him as “fun and inventive,” adding, “You never knew he was a Mellon.”
Andrew Mellon had two children: son Paul Mellon, TImothy's father, and daughter Ailsa Mellon Bruce. In 1969, they combined their individual private foundations to create the Mellon Foundation in honor of Andrew Mellon.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesA diversion led to his first career. While studying population density, Mellon decided he wanted to make diagrams for his research, so he learned how to code. That skill came in handy after graduation, when he started his first company, a one-man computer business in Guilford, Connecticut, a wealthy suburb outside of New Haven. Mellon’s first job title: president, programmer and dishwasher, he later joked. Around that time, he cast his first vote in a presidential election, straying from his family’s Republican roots to back Lyndon Johnson.
These were Great Society years, and in 1969, Mellon joined the fight, cofounding a nonprofit called the Sachem Fund, which described its objective in vague terms: “seek potential solutions for social problems.” Donations went to a foundation supporting economic development for southern Black people, a Gloria Steinem group fighting sexism and a Ralph Nader-backed organization working to increase civic engagement. The fund also backed esoteric causes, like the St. Louis Orienteering Club. During its first seven years in operation, the fund received $4.1 million in contributions (equivalent to $22 million today) and approved $2.7 million in grants ($14 million in today’s terms).
Years later, Mellon looked back on his and his first wife’s work with pride—and a tinge of regret. “We tackled problems of poverty, race and environmental despoliation that were overwhelming the country,” he wrote in his memoir. “Some of the projects, like the first hospice in Branford, Connecticut, were successful; others fell short of our hopes. Still being of the liberal persuasion at that age in our lives, I believe we may have overlooked some fundamental attributes of human nature that would have precluded success in any case.”
Timothy Mellon and his business partner David Fink, the two men on the right, participate in a groundbreaking ceremony for a new Massachusetts train station in 2006. They worked together from 1978 to 2022, when they sold their railroad company; FInk died shortly afterward.
David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty ImagesIt's easy to believe in big government when it’s not in your way. Mellon shifted businesses in the 1970s, moving from the upstart computer world to the highly regulated railroad industry. He partnered with a fourth-generation railroader named David Fink, whom he had met at a League of Women Voters event, and started a business manufacturing railroad ties. Before long, the two men decided they wanted to own some track as well, so they created a parent company named after Mellon’s Connecticut town, Guilford Transportation Industries. Guilford’s first purchase offer came with a hint of hubris. For a struggling, 10-mile line in Massachusetts, Mellon and Fink offered to assume ownership if the current owners would hand them $85,000. “They showed us politely to the door, thank you,” Mellon later recalled.
To own a railroad, Mellon realized he would need to spend money. He had plenty—around that time, Forbes estimated his net worth at $100 million. Between 1981 and 1983, his company spent $42.5 million buying two major railroad companies, the Maine Central and Boston & Maine railroads. In January 1984, the company added a third railroad, the near-bankrupt Delaware & Hudson, for $500,000. Approximately half that sum came via a loan from his family’s Mellon Bank, Mellon told Forbes in 1988; he didn’t specify whether the rest was from his inheritance. Through Guilford, Mellon and his partner suddenly controlled a reported 4,000 miles of track stretching from Maine to Buffalo.
A train still wearing the old Guilford Transportation paint colors leaves a Maine paper mill in June 2021, even though the company rebranded as Pan Am in 1998. Transporting materials for the paper industry made up a significant portion of the company's revenue.
Harrison Smith / North Country TrainsMellon’s strategy: Cut costs everywhere possible. For example, he deemed that trains needed two people, not five, to operate and abandoned swaths of track deemed unprofitable, laying off half Guilford’s workforce, according to a book by Rudy Garbely and past Forbes reporting. That efficiency-minded approach is now commonplace in the industry, termed “precision scheduled railroading,” but at the time, it was a shock—especially to workers. Guilford employees organized two major strikes around that time, between 1986 and 1988, the first after mass layoffs and failed contract negotiations and the second sparked by a death that union members reportedly blamed on neglected equipment. Desperate for more hands amid the first strike, Mellon jetted around the country searching for people, flying them on his private plane to wherever he had shortages. Employees fumed, but Mellon pressed on.
The Boston & Maine railroad broke even almost immediately, with $7 million of net income in 1984. The Delaware & Hudson did not fare as well, declaring bankruptcy in 1988, around the conclusion of the second strike. Mellon’s company then purchased the bankrupt Pan Am airline brand in 1998, rebranding as Pan Am Systems. Mellon and Fink briefly attempted to operate an airline, but it lost money and stopped operating within a decade; in his book, Mellon blamed his chief counsel, who submitted falsified financial documents to the government, the post-9/11 economy and unions.
By then, Mellon’s politics had changed. He shuttered the Sachem Fund, his Great Society promoter, at some point after 1980, doling out the last proceeds to conservative groups, like the Heritage Foundation. Mellon’s increasingly right-leaning ideology was no secret to his employees. “Mellon’s and Fink’s approach was, in a word, confrontational to nearly everyone,” says a former member of the marketing department, Stephen Demboske. “They played to their own beliefs, and it was, ‘I don’t care what you think. I’m going to do what my political conscience tells me to do.’”
Two-thousand miles due west of Connecticut, outside of Laramie, Wyoming, Mellon found respite alongside the Laramie River. He had been looking to get out of the northeast, and considered Florida, South Dakota and Wyoming—all states with no income tax. Florida was too busy and South Dakota too boring, so Mellon settled on “extra friendly, peaceful” Wyoming, home to little economic activity but many of the nation’s wealthiest heirs. In 2005, he settled down on a pair of ranches, which he combined with other land to form 6,700 acres of union-free wilderness.
Aviator Amelia Earhart shakes the hand of U.S. Ambassador to Britain Andrew Mellon, after completing the first transatlantic flight by a woman, landing in Northern Ireland.
New York Times/Getty ImagesIt was from this perch that Mellon made one of his more recent philanthropic contributions, not to a societal program but to a niche interest, donating $1 million to help search for Amelia Earhart’s airplane. Mellon, a licensed pilot with more than 10,000 flying hours, had become interested in Earhart after learning that two of his railroads had partnered with the aviator to launch an airline. “Because of my companies’ connections with Amelia Earhart,” he wrote in his memoir, “because of my interests in aviation and my own world circumnavigations, and because this strange mystery seemed (from what little I knew at the time) so close to solution, I decided that my support would be a useful contribution.” Even that act of charity, however, ended in acrimony. Mellon sued the nonprofit in 2013, alleging that it had accepted his money after it already found Earhart’s plane. A judge tossed the case before it went to trial, writing that it was merely Mellon’s opinion that the group had discovered the plane.
Mellon became more committed to politics around this time. He had long been somewhat involved—by early 2018, Mellon had given more than $400,000 to various candidates and causes. It was an impressive sum, but nothing to indicate what was to come next. In May 2018, six months before the midterms, Mellon shelled out $10 million to a super-PAC aimed at electing Republicans to the House of Representatives. In one move, he had established himself as one of the largest political donors in the country.
Timothy Mellon’s Federal Political Donations, 2010-2024
Heavyweights show up to title fights. In 2020, Mellon made his first million-dollar donation in a presidential election, donating $10 million to the pro-Trump America First Action super-PAC. After Trump lost and inspired a riot at the U.S. Capitol, several tycoons backed away from the MAGA movement. Not Mellon. He gave $53 million in 2021 to an attempt to crowdfund a border wall, sponsored by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Texas Tribune reported. All other contributions totaled $2.4 million.
Mellon soon had more cash at his disposal. In 2022, after nearly a half century in the railroad business, he sold his company to publicly traded CSX in a $600 million deal. It’s unclear exactly how much Mellon received, since his ownership stake remains unclear. But it was certainly significant—a decades-old legal document listed Mellon and Fink as the only shareholders. Given that Mellon had the money, and therefore likely put up most of the capital, it would make sense if he held the large majority of the company—and the windfall that came from its sale.
MELLON’S MILLIONS
Timothy Mellon says he isn't a billionaire, but Forbes thinks he’s close. First, there’s the inheritance. Grandfather Andrew Mellon left a hefty sum to Timothy and two other grandchildren in the mid-1930s, according to David Cannadine’s book “Mellon.” The book value of that gift was $23 million back then, or roughly $500 million today, adjusted for inflation. With wise investing, it could have grown far larger. For example, if the money were plowed into holdings that returned 75% as much as the S&P 500, the $23 million would have turned into $3.6 billion by now—leaving $1.2 billion for each of the grown-up grandchildren, if divided evenly. There’s also the business. Mellon spent an estimated $22 million of his own money buying up railroads in the early 1980s. He sold them in 2022 for $600 million, collecting an estimated $345 million after tax. Now he’s dumping money into politics, spending nearly $300 million over the last decade. It’s hard to imagine someone spending that much without at least a billion to spare, but Mellon, who did not have any children with his first wife, insists that’s exactly what he is doing. “Billionaire NOT,” he wrote in an email. “Never have been, never will be.”
That could also help explain why he has felt comfortable scaling up his political donations. Mellon seeded Trump’s main super PAC with a $5 million check last year, and the money continued to flow through the primary season. On the side, Mellon also backed Robert F. Kennedy, distributing $25 million to a super PAC supporting the heir to another American dynasty, old friends of the Mellons from summering in Cape Cod in the 1960s. But his focus remained on Trump, whose super-PAC has now received $76.5 million from Mellon—including $50 million the day after a New York jury convicted the former president on 34 criminal counts.
It was a fitting move for Mellon, who has long relished defiance, something his memoir makes clear. “No apologies will be forthcoming,” he wrote, “relative to the course we took to achieve our success.”
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