When I hear “Foundation” and “stable financial position” I think endowment.
They seem to be making the same mistake as the Mozilla foundation. You’re living on your nest egg instead of the interest. Spending 4 times as much as you should.
They seem to be making the same mistake as the Mozilla foundation. You’re living on your nest egg instead of the interest. Spending 4 times as much as you should.
That’s a very excellent start but I suspect someone will want to grow that later on. In fact they’re at 90% of their goal and less than 60% of their target date, so they could be looking for $150M as the stretch goal.
What do you do with the money, when people have stopped valuing Wikimedia enough that they are no longer paying for it to exist?
There will be times when Wikipedia is not sexy, but taken for granted. That’s when you need the endowment.
It might be valued as an institution with modest economic power, which doesn't seem to me to add anything to the world that isn't already there.
2 years of all current spending as a cushion seems like plenty to me (for Wikipedia, which has not faced any unexpected financial shocks, even in 2020). If you can't navigate shocks and downward trends with that cushion, then you probably ought not to exist.
Plenty of things have a huge impact on your life and yet nobody wants to pay for them. They're important, but they're not important. If you have an endowment, you don't have to keep wrestling with keeping the two in sync.
I imagine a political mess, of people trying to extract personal benefit from the remaining endowment.