Every US private foundation has to file a Form 990-PF with the IRS each year, and unlike a hedge fund letter, the filing is public. It lists assets at the start and end of the year, the gifts that came in, the grants that went out, and, in most cases, the actual securities the foundation holds. Feed enough of those filings into a database and you can do something nobody’s monthly newsletter can: estimate an investment track record for every large foundation in the country and rank them.
We did that with the Hedge Fund Alpha 990-PF database, which now covers roughly 178,000 foundations, 2.1 million filings, and 13.5 million holdings records spanning 1987 through 2025. Some of the results were impressive. The strongest ten-year run at scale does not belong to a university-affiliated giant or a famous endowment imitator. It belongs to the family foundation of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) chief executive Jensen Huang, and the reason is exactly what you would guess.
The full top ten, using our estimates over the 2012 to 2024 window with at least ten usable years and $50 million in current assets, with Huang shown at his corrected figure:
| # | Foundation | State | Est. annualized return | Years used | Latest assets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation† | CA | 74.5% | 10 | $9.21B |
| 2 | Mercer Family Foundation | MA | 35.4% | 11 | $88M |
| 3 | Rockland Trust Charitable Foundation | MA | 31.5% | 10 | $51M |
| 4 | Cummings Foundation Grants | MA | 30.9% | 10 | $258M |
| 5 | Robert McLean and Jenepher* | PA | 29.7% | 12 | $59M |
| 6 | Shell USA Company Foundation | TX | 28.3% | 11 | $52M |
| 7 | Cascade Hemophilia Consortium | MI | 28.2% | 12 | $100M |
| 8 | Lilly Endowment | IN | 26.2% | 12 | $79.91B |
| 9 | Teshinsky Family Foundation | CA | 24.3% | 11 | $109M |
| 10 | Enlight Foundation | CA | 24.1% | 11 | $253M |
*Name as reported in the IRS source data, where it is truncated. †Corrected figure: Nvidia’s actual returns substituted for the 2015-16 cost-basis filings and 2023 included; the tool’s screened number is 31.4%. See the methodology below.
On the tool’s screened board Huang shows 74.5% and sits third, behind two shops managing less than $100 million each. One belongs to Robert Mercer, who held a top ranking at Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies. The other is the Rockland Trust Charitable Foundation, the giving arm of the Massachusetts bank behind Independent Bank Corp (NASDAQ:INDB); it runs a conventional stock-and-bond book of about $51 million and has distributed more than $8 million in grants around the communities the bank serves. Among foundations with more than $1 billion in assets, Huang’s record is the best in our data, and it is not close to anything except Lilly Endowment’s.
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