Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on July 30, 2025.
Retired money manager Fayez Sarofim had paintings by Rothko and Picasso on his office walls, a stake in the NFL’s Houston Texans and his name on university and theater halls. When he died in 2022, Forbes estimated the Egypt-born, Harvard-educated investor’s wealth totaled $1.5 billion.
It now appears that was a serious undercount — one rumor says his fortune was more than 10 times larger — and among the beneficiaries of the financier’s posthumous largesse are Sarofim’s adopted hometown of Houston, Texas, which now has a giant new grantmaker.
Thanks to a $1.35 billion contribution in 2023 from Sarofim’s estate and apparent investment gains, the recently formed Sarofim Foundation reported an endowment that as of last summer totalled over $2.57 billion. That puts the grantmaker among the top five foundations in Texas, and there’s still more to come.
New Executive Director Ryan Dolibois, who joined the foundation a little over a year after its founder’s death, says assets will grow to about $3 billion, but do not expect decisions in a hurry. Sarofim was an investor in the Warren Buffett mold. He bought shares in companies he believed in and waited for them to rise. His motto was reportedly “never sell.”
“Nervous energy is the destroyer of wealth, was basically his take,” Dolibois said. “We wanted to bring that same kind of energy to the way we thought about our strategy.”
Dolibois, who has now been with the foundation for two years, said he has taken his time to get to know Sarofim and his network of businesses, in which the average employee tenure is more than 20 years, and whose members include the foundation’s three board members.
One is Sarofim’s son, Christopher, who is not only chair of the foundation but also chair of Fayez Sarofim & Co., president of Sarofim International Management Company, and a director of the Sarofim Group. Another is Raye White, who helped Sarofim launch Fayez Sarofim & Co. in 1958, still serves as executive vice president of Fayez Sarofim & Co., and whom Dolibois calls “the moral compass.” The third is William Gentry Lee, CEO and CIO of Fayez Sarofim & Co.
The foundation is not, technically, the first Sarofim Foundation. In the 1970s, Sarofim created a personal trust under his name that gave modestly for decades, averaging just under $2 million a year by the end of his life. But his will directed the transfer of its assets, totalling $28 million, to the new organization. Nor is it the only foundation with Sarofim in the name. Sarofim’s third wife and widow, Susan, has her own philanthropy, the De Barneure Sarofim Foundation, and will not be involved. “There was no expectation for that,” said Dolibois. Similarly, his first wife, Louisa Stude, runs the Louisa Stude Sarofim Foundation.
Dolibois and the team at Sarofim have prepared by conducting an extensive landscape survey, holding calls with more than 200 nonprofits and conducting dozens of site visits. He said the foundation’s broad initial focus areas will remain the same — education, health and the arts — but its exact approach will take time to define.
“There will be a particular emphasis on education, just given where a lot of his historical grantmaking was and the interests that he illustrated during his lifetime,” Dolibois said. “We might be another year out before we’ve really honed in on the exact approach.”
Sarofim ramps up: From pledging tens of millions to granting hundreds of millions
Sarofim started to make a name as a megadonor years before his death. Heir to an Egyptian cotton fortune and descended from the country’s nobility, he and his wife, Susan, made headlines for several major awards to Houston institutions. Two of the biggest were a $70 million pledge to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2015, and a $25 million donation in 2018 to the Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center to fund a new hospital and trauma care center named for the couple.
But his new foundation must spend more money than those two gifts combined every year — specifically, about $150 million annually, i.e., 5% of its predicted assets. That will be a dramatic change for both the Sarofim family and for Dolibois.
“The main difference, Michael, is now, people answer my phone calls,” he joked. “I’m much funnier, really good looking now.”
Dolibois has spent his career in Houston schools, coming to the city from the East Coast as a fifth grade teacher through Teach for America before transitioning to administration. He started as a vice president at YES Prep Public Schools (which Sarofim personally supported for years) and later as an executive at Episcopal High School (a frequent grantee of the trust). Most recently, he served as superintendent of The Yellowstone Schools, a nonprofit Christian private school for pre-kindergarten to 10th grade in Houston’s Third Ward, one of the city’s historic African American neighborhoods.
“I was really pleased that the foundation was interested in a candidate like me, with a profile like mine,” said Dolibois, who said that other than encounters as a fundraiser, he had “no previous relationship with the Sarofim family.” “That said a lot about the way that they wanted to set this up, and how they wanted to be in the community.”
Where will the Sarofim Foundation send its checks?
Early moves by a new mega grantmaker can be valuable signals — or simply noise. For Sarofim, there are plenty of recent grants to examine, thanks to public announcements and a recent 990, which covers July 2023 through June 2024. What they mean remains to be seen. Dolibois suggested many of the awards over the past year-plus were “in the pipeline” before he arrived, albeit with a smattering of “new stuff.”
For instance, the foundation made a $10 million commitment to the Baylor College of Medicine, announced last September, which matched an earlier $10 million commitment from Fayez Sarofim. But it also made a $10 million pledge to Princeton University, according to its 990s. Princeton is the alma mater of Sarofim’s son, Christopher, who is now the foundation’s board chair. Sarofim’s old trust had made a couple awards to Baylor, but none to Princeton.
Both of those universities received $2 million grants in the foundation’s most recent grant cycle, while every other award in that docket was in the low six figures or less, including dozens of five-figure awards.
The largest of that second tier consisted of a $375,000 award to United Way of Greater Houston and $250,000 grants to a handful of schools, including Episcopal High School, YES Prep Public Schools, KIPP Texas and Etoile Academy. All had been previously supported by Sarofim’s personal trust or via individual giving, other than Etoile.
In all, the foundation gave more than $7 million, or 80% of all awards, to educational nonprofits from mid-2023 to mid-2024, according to Candid. Next up were human services ($1.1 million, or 12%) and arts and culture ($910,000, or 10%). With the Baylor College of Medicine award counted as education funding, health spending totalled just $385,000. Nearly 89% of grants went to Texas groups.
The foundation has also shown some recent interest in disaster response. In July 2024, Sarofim, CenterPoint Energy Foundation and the grocery chain H-E-B each contributed $1 million to help launch a Hurricane Beryl disaster relief fund.
Patient founder, patient grantmaker?
Sarofim once said that if he knew about all the ups and downs that were ahead for Texas oil companies and other energy companies in the 1960s, let alone in future years, he never would have invested in the sector.
But Dolibois is struck by Sarofim’s ultimate conclusion — “If you just stay in long enough, it actually tends to get better and go better” — and suggested the foundation may treat grantees similarly.
“You’re going to have years where they fumble the ball, or there’s a leadership transition, or the bottom falls out of a market or, in the education space, test scores go way down, right?” Dolibois said. “I do think that we’ll be a group that, if we find somebody that’s a trusted relationship, and this is aligned to his legacy and the board’s interests and everything else, that we want to be a partner for the long term.”
Such long-term, trust-based support would be warmly welcomed by a sector that has spent decades asking for just that type of funding. It may help that the foundation — which currently lists five staff and has no open positions — also aims to stay lean. “There’s also a commitment to not having a lot of — what would be the nicer way to say this? — kind of, foundation bloat,” Dolibois said.
That said, outsiders should not necessarily expect total transparency, at least right away. Sarofim was known for staying well behind the scenes. The wealth manager’s nickname was “The Sphinx.” The foundation’s offices, Dolibois noted, do not even have its name on the door.
“How we honor his legacy and his discretion, and at the same time not just fulfill the legal requirements but also be a good steward of this money in a meaningful way, is something we’re still working through,” he said.
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