It was one of the strangest phone calls I ever received from a donor.

It was from Amy Fackelman, a Senior Philanthropic Advisor at the California Community Foundation. They gave us a $100,000 donation from an anonymous donor 2 years in a row.

We sent Amy 2 final grant reports on how we used the donations and asked her to forward them to the anonymous donor. We never knew whether she did or not.  Until now.

“Our anonymous donor has a question for you,” Amy said. “He wants to know what you would do if he gave you $10 million in cash and you had to spend it all within one year.”

I did my best to maintain my composure.  $10 million would be our largest donation since we started Smile Train.  I told Amy, “We’ll have a detailed proposal for your anonymous donor within one week.  Okay?”

Amy was thrilled. Most charities take forever to do anything. But we weren’t run like a charity – we ran Smile Train like a business.

Within a week we had a 46-page detailed proposal complete with budgets, projections, photos, references, etc. It explained how a $10 million donation would help us provide 40,000 cleft surgeries in the poorest countries in the world.

Two days later Amy called back. “The anonymous donor like your proposal,” she said. “You’ll receive $10 million next week.”

Two weeks later Amy called again.  She said the anonymous donor wanted to meet with me. Next thing I know I am sitting in Amy’s office in LA. She explains they have never met the anonymous donor and only know that David is his first name. He is down the hall in conference room B waiting for me, “Good luck!”  she says.  

When I opened the conference room door, David Gelbaum was sitting at a large conference room table. He was 5’ 5” tall, balding, with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, professorial spectacles, and piercing brown eyes. He had a very soft, high-pitched, raspy voice.  He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

I apologized for bringing so much stuff, but I explained I didn’t know what he wanted to talk about, so I brought basically everything.

He laughed and asked if I had any videos. Yes, I did! Our video was narrated by the most trusted man in America – Walter Cronkite who was one of our major supporters. I lowered the lights and pressed play.

After the video ended and I turned the lights back up and said nothing. I could tell David was touched by what he saw.  

“I am going to give you an additional $10 million,” he said. “Now tell me more about what you do and how you do it.”

5 minutes into the meeting and he gave us another $10 million? I was stunned.

I spent about an hour taking him through our history, our business plan, and our results. I could tell he had a very high I.Q.  His questions were thoughtful and sharp. His ideas and suggestions were valuable. He even had a sense of humor which I really appreciated.

A couple of months later, Amy called again and said the anonymous donor wanted to have lunch with me. He wanted to bring his mother. So, I hopped on a plane and met them at a nice restaurant where they had lunch every week.

David’s mom was a very frail, very sweet lady in her late 80s.  When she worked as a nurse in Boston back in the 1950s, she used to take care of newborn babies with clefts.  So, when she saw one of our Smile Train ads, in the LA Times, she clipped it out and sent us $250. She did this a second time and was so impressed with our results; she told her son David about us.

That led to two $100,000 anonymous donations to Smile Train.

And the final grant reports for those two donations led to David’s first $10 million donation. Which led to our first meeting and the second $10 million donation. And now we were having lunch.

It’s an amazing story of how a $250 donation turned into what ultimately became $27 million worth of donations to the Smile Train.

Over the next few years, I got to know David and his mom better as we had more lunches and more meetings, and he gave us $7 million in additional donations.

 Sometime after the great recession of 2008, David’s “anonymity” vanished, and several news articles came out about him. That when we learned that our anonymous donor, David Gelbaum, was one of the greatest philanthropists in the history of the United States.

After making a fortune as a genius hedge fund manager, David gave away more than $1 billion anonymously.

He gave more than $100 million to the Sierra Club, $100 million to the ACLU and hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve almost 1,200 square miles of land in California which is equivalent to the size of Yosemite National Park. To honor his dad who died in World War II, David donated more than $250 million to help veterans from the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars.

Soon after we learned all of this, I received an email from David saying he was sorry, but he couldn’t give us any more money. At that point he given us almost $30 million. 

He never explained why but I think he was badly hurt with the 2008 world financial crisis. He sent a letter around to all of his big charities explaining that his giving days were over.

I kept in touch with them know as I really liked and respected him. I meet with them once or twice a year and get his feedback on what we were doing.

He was a brilliant man and I really valued his advice. I got to meet his wife Monica one time when he invited us to his house in Newport Beach. She was wonderful. And they had a very beautiful, very modest house with David’s old Honda Civic parked in front.

The house and the car told you everything you needed to know about David Gelbaum.

He was the most selfless, humble, egoless, self-effacing and generous person I’ve ever met.

I was very sad to hear recently that David passed away on September 30, 2018 at the young age of 68 years old.

But what really broke my heart was that I have searched the Internet, high and low and I cannot find a single obituary, tribute, honor, thank you, recognition, news article, TV segment or web post that announces the passing of this great man and recognizes all of the amazing things that he did.

How can this be?

David Gelbaum singlehandedly changed the lives of millions of children and adults – how can he die and not a single person or organization says thank you?

That is just wrong.

I am going to look into this and find out what happened and how we can celebrate one of the greatest philanthropists that ever lived.

 Until then, I am grateful to have the chance to tell you about what a great man David Gelbaum was.

And why I feel so very lucky to have met him.

Here is an article about David that you might appreciate from The New York Times….

You’d Never Know He’s a Sun King

By TODD WOODYMAY 8, 2010

AMID the $6 million homes perched on a beachfront cliff in this conservative Southern California enclave, the seven-year-old Honda Civic hybrid with the Obama bumper sticker is the giveaway.

It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.

Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.

“I think his impact on green technology is huge,” says Bill Gross, the serial technology entrepreneur and founder of eSolar, a solar power start-up in which Mr. Gelbaum has invested. “He is supporting bolder and riskier bets, and he’s doing it from a different filter than a traditional venture capitalist, and I think that makes a wider opportunity for success.”

In this economic downturn, many venture capitalists have grown cautious about putting money into what Vinod Khosla, the prominent Silicon Valley green tech investor, calls “science experiments.” But Quercus Trust is still taking chances on blue-sky start-ups pursuing technological breakthroughs.

Working outside the clubby venture capital network, Mr. Gelbaum has, until recently, maintained an obsessively low profile. In Silicon Valley, he remains something of an unknown. Associates say his near-invisibility is owed to a genuine modesty and concerns over the security of his family because of his wealth. Recipients of his philanthropy, for instance, signed confidentiality agreements that forbade mention of his name.

Mr. Gelbaum says he decided to break his long silence upon becoming chief executive in February of Entech Solar, one of his portfolio companies that is publicly traded. “This is what’s best for the company,” he says, pointing out that Entech benefits if he maintains a more public profile.

It is too early to predict whether Mr. Gelbaum’s big green bets will pay off. But he’s been capitalizing on two trends: the rapid decline in the price of photovoltaic power, and a focus on cutting capital costs as solar power competition with China intensifies.

His environmental philanthropy also gives him an influence beyond laboratories and boardrooms. He has given $200 million to the Sierra Club and $250 million to the Wildlands Conservancy, a land trust he co-founded that has acquired and preserved 1,200 square miles of land in California, including more than a half million acres of the Mojave Desert.

The desert land, which was donated to the federal government, has become the focus of a fight over environmental preservation and renewable energy development. At Wildlands’ urging, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, introduced legislation in December to permanently protect the donated land. Though her opposition scuttled several multibillion-dollar solar power plants planned for the area, including some by eSolar’s rivals, even the competitors say that Mr. Gelbaum’s motivation was environmental, not economic.

The Wildlands Conservancy has emerged as a force promoting “distributed generation” — putting renewable energy installations on rooftops, near cities or on degraded farmland. Its efforts dovetail with Mr. Gelbaum’s belief that solar farms should not be built on pristine lands as well as his big bets on the emergence of a decentralized energy system tied together by smart grid software.

“I still don’t know which technology will end up winning, but I believe we’re on the cusp of a revolution in how energy is generated and distributed,” he says.

AT 61, Mr. Gelbaum has a receding hairline, a scruffy beard and glasses that frame curious eyes. Inside the circle of entrepreneurs who have received his financial backing, he has engendered a loyalty bordering on adoration.

“He’s got this big heart that’s coupled with such a keen intellect,” says Peter Corsell, the chief executive of GridPoint, a smart-grid software start-up backed by Mr. Gelbaum, Goldman Sachs and other investors. “He’s close to egoless, like a monk.”

Mr. Gelbaum grew up in Minnesota, moving to Orange County, Calif., in 1964 when his father, a mathematician, joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine. He bounced around U.C. Berkeley and Humboldt State College in Northern California before returning to Irvine to receive his mathematics degree in 1972.

After graduating, he worked for a math professor, Edward O. Thorp, whose theories led to the establishment of what became Princeton/Newport Partners, one of the first investment firms to use mathematical formulas to price stocks and derivatives.

Princeton/Newport Partners collapsed in 1989, following the indictment of five executives in connection with a scheme to create illegal tax losses. Mr. Thorp and Mr. Gelbaum were not implicated, and an appellate court later overturned the other executives’ convictions.

Mr. Gelbaum was a co-founder of another hedge fund firm, the Sierra Enterprises Group, following the breakup of Princeton/Newport, and worked there until his retirement in 2002. Mr. Thorp says he lost contact with his onetime protégé during those years. “He was so low-key,” Mr. Thorp said by e-mail.

He began making contributions to the Sierra Club and other environmental groups in the late 1970s.

“I was interested in the environment because as a child my happiest memories were of camping and hiking,” says Mr. Gelbaum, speaking in a soft, raspy voice.

He says he has a longstanding admiration of the Sierra Club, dating back to a job he once had in sawmills that environmentalists were singling out in an effort to protect redwood forests.

Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club, says he first met Mr. Gelbaum in 1992 when the financier called to talk about a state parks bond measure. That conversation led to others, and Mr. Gelbaum became the Sierra Club’s largest individual benefactor, financing programs to help the environmental organization reach out to hunters and veterans, as well as to African-Americans, Hispanics and other groups.

“Many of the environmental justice programs we carried out have been his idea,” says Mr. Pope.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Gelbaum also met David Myers, an ardent environmentalist. They founded the Wildlands Conservancy, which began to acquire vast swaths of the Mojave. They created nature preserves elsewhere in California that offered free outdoor programs for underprivileged children.

A solar plant in Lancaster, Calif., run by eSolar, in which David Gelbaum has invested. He is also encouraging rooftop installations. CrediteSolar

But he insisted that his generosity be kept anonymous. “I didn’t want to create problems for my family, and I also prefer not to take credit for these things,” says Mr. Gelbaum.

The mysterious millions attracted attention, however, and in 2004 The Los Angeles Times identified Mr. Gelbaum as the donor in the third profile of the philanthropist to be published. (He later confirmed that he had also given at least $93.5 million to the American Civil Liberties Union and $246.6 million to aid veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.)

Despite his wealth, Mr. Gelbaum remains unpretentious. He holds business meetings in a relatively modest mid-century Modernist home — albeit with a stunning view of the Pacific Ocean for a backdrop. He doesn’t surround himself with a large staff, fancy cars or private jets. After lunch, he even does his own dishes.

Bottom of Form

David Gelbaum says he has given away or paid in taxes three-quarters of what he’s made. “Philanthropy is a job and I was just doing my job,” he says.

AS scores of green tech entrepreneurs have discovered, Mr. Gelbaum is not an absentee investor.

“He took an interest that’s much deeper than other investors, right down to the type of algorithms we’re writing,” says Mr. Corsell.

Rob Lamkin, chief executive of Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, Calif., was in the office at 7 one morning when the phone rang.

“There was a gentleman on the other end saying, ‘Good morning, my name’s David and I’m interested in solar,’ ” says Mr. Lamkin, whose start-up is developing power plants that generate electricity from inflatable solar receivers that resemble giant balloons.

Three months of phone conversations followed before Mr. Gelbaum revealed he was an investor. Around the same time in 2007, Bill Gross of eSolar received an e-mail message from a person who identified himself only as “David.”

“I didn’t know who he was,” Mr. Gross says, “but he really asked such thoughtful questions about the solar energy space, and that led me to reach out to him.”

Mr. Gelbaum showed up for a meeting at eSolar’s headquarters in Pasadena, Calif., wearing jeans and carrying a backpack. “He was so well versed in math and science, it was like we were talking to one of our engineers,” says Mr. Gross.

Mr. Gelbaum says he made what he considers his first green investment in 2002 when, impressed by the Prius, he bought stock in Toyota. He subsequently took large positions in a host of public renewable energy companies, including First Solar and SunPower.

In 2007, David Anthony, a venture capitalist in New York, noticed that Quercus Trust had taken a large stake in an Australian solar company he was interested in.

“There was no way to find him on the Internet, so I just wrote him a letter,” says Mr. Anthony.

A one-hour meeting turned into a five-hour discussion and eventually an agreement by which Mr. Anthony’s 21 Ventures co-invests with Quercus Trust and helps manage Mr. Gelbaum’s portfolio.

Essential to Mr. Gelbaum’s approach, not surprisingly, is that he is hedging his investments — backing, for instance, distributed energy start-ups but also companies developing energy storage for centralized solar farms.

David Gelbaum is making one of his bigger bets on Entech Solar, a Fort Worth company that once built solar systems for NASA spacecraft and is developing a low-cost photovoltaic technology. As a hedge against rising solar cell prices, Mr. Gelbaum has also invested in a Chinese solar module maker, Solar Enertech.

Mark O’Neill, Entech Solar’s co-founder, says David Gelbaum has pushed relentlessly to cut costs.

“He’s doing calculus about how to save cents per watt so quickly in his head that I have a hard time keeping up with him without a spreadsheet,” Mr. O’Neill says.

IF there’s a place where Mr. Gelbaum’s entrepreneurial and environmental impulses converge, it is in the Mojave Desert.

He has arranged for a car — a Prius, naturally — to take us to Whitewater Canyon, a 2,851-acre preserve near Palm Springs acquired by the Wildlands Conservancy.

Under the legislation proposed by Senator Feinstein, Whitewater Canyon would serve as a wildlife corridor to a new national monument. That bill would also protect hundreds of thousands of other acres that Mr. Gelbaum helped acquire, some of which the government had planned to lease for huge solar thermal power plants.

“There are other areas appropriate for solar plants,” says David. Gelbaum, kicking off his shoes and walking barefoot along a riverbank. “As distributed solar becomes lower-priced, there are plenty of roofs to put solar on.”

With some other large solar projects bogged down in disputes over their environmental impact, Mr. Gelbaum’s bets could pay off as utilities sign contracts for huge photovoltaic projects and as China’s appetite for solar energy grows — evidenced by a 2,000-megawatt deal that a Chinese company signed with eSolar this year.

And after years of operating in the shadows, Mr. Gelbaum seems comfortable finally stepping into the sunlight and even letting a little ego shine through.

“I’ve gone long on solar as I’m expecting that’s where my big win will be,” he says.