Foster Friess

Before the obituaries turned Foster Friess into a one-paragraph punchline — the cowboy-hatted donor whose awkward 2012 contraception joke swallowed Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign (Nonprofit Quarterly) — he was, for decades, one of the most admired growth-stock investors in America. CNBC called him one of “the century’s great investors,” and Forbes placed him alongside Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and John Templeton among the ten most successful money managers of a generation (Jackson Hole Press). The arc of his fortune is almost cartoonish in its American-ness: he started with $800 in accumulated U.S. Army leave pay and built a firm that at its peak managed $17 billion (Jackson Hole Press, Delaware Business Times). The politics came later, and mostly out of the same impulse that drove the philanthropy.

The investor

Friess grew up in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, a first-generation college graduate (Jackson Hole Press). His mother dropped out of school in the eighth grade to pick cotton in order to save the family farm in Texas; his father dealt cattle and horses (Jackson Hole Press). He earned a degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin (Associated Press), then served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer in the 1960s, including with the 1st Guided Missile Brigade at Fort Bliss, Texas (Matzav, Associated Press).

In the mid-1960s he moved to Delaware to work as an investor, joining a Brittingham family-controlled NYSE member firm in Wilmington and working his way up to director of research (Delaware Business Times). In 1974, after a decade in the industry, he and his wife Lynn launched their own firm, Friess Associates (Delaware Business Times, Matzav). The first year was so lean it barely fed the family; Friess described himself as a self-professed workaholic in the firm’s early years, later crediting his turn to Christianity with restoring some balance (Delaware Business Times).

Then the money started working. Friess launched the Brandywine Fund in 1985 and the Brandywine Blue Fund in the early 1990s (Delaware Business Times, Associated Press). The two mutual funds pushed Friess Associates into the ranks of top boutique growth-equity managers, reporting 20 percent annual gains as the 2000s began, and the firm grew to $17 billion under his management (Delaware Business Times). Colleagues described a leader with an unusual knack for spotting outstanding young teammates and pushing them to excellence; the firm, they said, owed its long success to the teams he built (Delaware Business Times). By late 2001, succession planning led Affiliated Managers Group to acquire a majority interest in Friess Associates, and Friess officially retired — to a ranch in Cody, Wyoming, and a second home in Scottsdale, Arizona — though he stayed close to the firm’s activities (Delaware Business Times).

The philanthropist

If the investing made Friess rich, the giving made him famous in his home circles. He donated over $500 million to charitable causes over his lifetime, according to his Foster’s Outriders political and philanthropic organization (Associated Press). Delaware friends recalled iconic birthday parties where guests registered a charity at the door so he could donate money — and as his success grew, the checks got larger (Delaware Business Times). At his 70th birthday party, he presented each of the 110 invited couples with a $70,000 personal check to use for whatever charities they selected (Nonprofit Quarterly).

In 1981, he and Lynn created what became the Lynn and Foster Friess Family Foundation (originally the Life Enrichment Foundation) to fund Christian agencies and churches along with education, youth development, and disaster relief (Nonprofit Quarterly). As of the fiscal year ending April 2011, it held over $104 million in assets, making it the third-largest foundation in Wyoming (Nonprofit Quarterly). His giving ranged from sponsoring Water Mission’s clean-water work in Malawi to relief efforts after the Indonesian tsunami and the Haiti earthquake, mobile medical services in Wilmington and Chester, Pennsylvania, and causes across Wyoming (Delaware Business Times). One Delaware friend remembered him being moved to tears by a prenatal program committee and following up with another multi-million gift to a Wilmington health system (Delaware Business Times).

The honors piled up: Humanitarian of the Year at the National Charity Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C., in 2000 (Delaware Business Times), the Horatio Alger Award in 2012 (Delaware Business Times), and the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award (Jackson Hole Press). He joked that it was never really his money anyway — it was “borrowed from God,” so it had to be shared (Delaware Business Times).

A 2012 Nonprofit Quarterly review of the foundation’s tax filings added a note of skepticism: beginning with the fiscal year ending in April 2005, the foundation routed nearly all of its grantmaking through the National Christian Foundation, which sharply reduced the public transparency of where the money went (Nonprofit Quarterly). The same review questioned large investment-advisor fees and interest expenses in the foundation’s recent filings (Nonprofit Quarterly).

The political donor

Friess was a GOP kingmaker for four decades (Associated Press). Federal campaign finance records show he gave almost $7 million directly to hundreds of candidates starting in the early 1980s (Associated Press). He was the “consummate behind-the-scenes” force in Delaware Republican politics, backing nearly every major GOP gubernatorial campaign there as well as federal races (Delaware Business Times).

His signature political project was Rick Santorum’s 2012 presidential run (Associated Press). Friess was a million-dollar donor to Santorum’s Red, White and Blue super PAC (Nonprofit Quarterly), campaigned for him, and came through with badly needed funds for television advertising ahead of Santorum’s Iowa caucuses win (Associated Press). The partnership is remembered mostly for Friess’s infamous aside to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell about a birth-control recipe involving aspirin and women’s knees — a joke Santorum called “stupid” and Friess later apologized for on his “Campfire” blog (Nonprofit Quarterly).

His reach into conservative media was direct, not just donor-driven. He put up $3 million in funding for the launch of The Daily Caller, the site Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel founded in 2010 — a fact noted by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz at the time (SourceWatch).

In 2018, Friess tried being a candidate himself, running for Wyoming governor (Associated Press). In a six-way Republican primary he finished second with about 25 percent of the vote to State Treasurer Mark Gordon’s 33 percent, then complained that Democrats registering as Republicans had cost him critical votes; Gordon went on to be elected governor (Associated Press).

Death

Diagnosed in September 2020 with myelodysplasia, a bone marrow disease, Friess kept in contact with reporters even while sustaining himself, in his staff’s description, on “a pizza, spaghetti and oatmeal cookie diet” (Associated Press). He died surrounded by his family at his home in Scottsdale on May 27, 2021 (Associated Press). He was survived by his wife Lynnette, four children, and 15 grandchildren (Associated Press), with remembrance services planned in Scottsdale, Jackson, and Rice Lake (Associated Press, Jackson Hole Press). A longtime friend said it plainly: “Every so often America loses a legend. Foster Friess was just that, a true Horatio Alger story. A life that can happen ‘only in America.’” (Delaware Business Times)

What this profile does not claim

• It does not give an exact date of birth; obituary aggregators report April 2, 1940, but no source read for this profile confirmed the day.
• It does not claim a specific net worth; a 2012 estimate put it around $530 million, which is a dated single-source figure.
• It does not give exact 2018 primary vote counts beyond the Associated Press’s 25 percent to 33 percent rounding.
• It does not claim that Friess founded The Daily Caller; Carlson and Neil Patel founded it, and Friess funded it.
• It does not describe what happened to his remaining Daily Caller stake after his death.
• It does not describe the family foundation’s activity after 2021.