I told you last October that the single biggest donor to Jennifer Lopez’s tax free Maribel Foundation was hedge fund king Ray Dalio. The Greenwich, Connecticut based billionaire wrote a check to Maribel for $250,000 in 2008. Now I can tell you he also wrote a second check, in 2009, for $450,000. That brings his total donation to JLO’s fund  to $700,000 over two years. Lopez herself only put in $204,000 during the same period. (There’s no public filing yet for 2009 or 2010.)
This would seem like a big deal since Dalio’s business is the cult like Bridgewater hedge fund that runs $80 billion worth of investments. In a recent profile of Dalio in The New Yorker, John Cassidy offers up a puff piece on Dalio and never mentions JLO or even Dalio’s extreme interest in Transcendental Meditation. Dalio gave $1.23 million to director David Lynch’s TM Foundation in 2008 and another $2.1 million in 2009. The man clearly believes in having a mantra. He’s devoted to TM, yet this somehow escaped Cassidy.
Dalio also put $45 million into his Dalio Family Foundation in 2009– $17 million of which to charities including $2 million to the press-shy Robin Hood Foundation. None of this was in The New Yorker piece. Also left out was the tidbit that Dalio’s wife, Barbara, is reportedly a direct descendant of the old school money Vanderbilt-Whitney families. So much for his “moving to the country and starting a business out of a barn.”
Maribel Foundation, meanwhile, donated $450,000 to a Los Angeles children’s hospital last year.
