David Gelles
speaker
265 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 28 Jan
David Gelles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that, I think, also works both ways.
On the one hand, I spoke with employees who were really resentful of the fact that they gave decades of their lives to this company and did not walk away with a meaningful amount of money.
On the flip side, it was only by controlling that equity so carefully that Chouinard was able to do this extraordinary thing that I broke the news about in the New York Times a few years ago, which was that he essentially gave away the entire company into a new structure that now facilitates the donation of all Patagonia profits to environmental charities.
Well, he at one point had an offer for $6 billion, and yet he didn't want it.
His wife didn't want it.
Dave, I spent time with them at their home in Wyoming, and they live in the same log cabin they built for themselves in the 1970s.
The furniture is all from goodwill or it's secondhand.
He cooks for himself every night.
They don't have a chef.
They don't have a cleaning lady.
These people live incredibly modest, humble lives.
And it was only because that was sort of who they were that they were able to do this extraordinary transaction a few years ago.
And here's what they did just very briefly.
The Chouinard family owned 100% of the equity in Patagonia.
What they did, without getting too technical, was transfer the equity to a new series of trusts and nonprofit organizations that essentially transferred the equity out of their possession into the holding of a trust and some nonprofits.
And then they instructed...
the trust to have the company itself donate all of its profits that are not reinvested in the company, which is somewhere between $60 and $100 million a year, to the nonprofit organizations, which now give away all that money to large-scale land conservation and environmental activism on an ongoing basis.
One way I like to think about this story is that it's the compound interest of
of values, what you see is that the values Chouinard cared about in the 1970s are still the ones informing the company today.
And as a result, the company and its profits are having these big outsize impacts.
Showing 241–260 of 265 · page 13 of 14
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