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Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara Palmeri, coming to you live from the Port of Miami, where I’m about to embark on a Summit at Sea voyage—a sort of Ted meets Burning Man meets Milken conference experience, co-founded by my fellow American University alum Jeff Rosenthal. Tomorrow, I’ll be moderating a bipartisan panel featuring Republican strategist Joe Hack and Biden surrogate Ashley Allison.
🎧 The conversation may pop up on my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, so stay tuned. (And thanks to all the supporters who helped vault the show into the top 15 among all news podcasts!) Until then, check out my latest episode, with Trump advisor and Pennsylvania guru David Urban, about how Trump is sabotaging the mail-in ballot effort in a battleground state that he won by 44,000 votes in 2016 but lost by 81,000 in 2020.
For tonight’s edition of TBTB, I’m handing the reins to my partner Teddy Schleifer, who has an intriguing story about a relatively new fixture on the D.C. money scene: Rory Gates, the 24-year-old son of Bill and Melinda. I had heard about his political interests last year, but I wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. Many young scions who catch the political bug lose interest before making much of a dent. Gates might be different.
But first, a few notes from around town…
- Kellyanne comes home: Much has been written about the potential return of Kellyanne Conway to the Trump orbit, including in this column. Axios recently ran a headline about Conway “considering” an offer to join the 2024 team, weeks after I detailed how Melania Trump has been making a hard push to bring Conway back into the fold. Melania “trusts her,” according to a source close to the family, and views her as a way to keep Jared Kushner at a distance. It would be a good fit, in many ways: Conway still has Trump’s ear and serves as a rare high-level surrogate on Fox News. For Trump, however, there may be more value in keeping Kellyanne on the airwaves, rather than folding her into the campaign.Of course, in some ways, Conway is already working for Trump. She’s been on retainer for the Republican National Committee since at least January, but since Trump assimilated the R.N.C. last month—replacing Ronna McDaniel with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and appointing campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita as C.O.O.—everything at the organization essentially ladders up to him. “Has she ever really left?” one Trump aide reminded me. Conway herself told me her job at the R.N.C. is “not really” the same as working for Trump, since it’s a continuation of the retainer she’s had for many years on projects such as data, digital, state party, and member services, etcetera. Conway, who recently had a sit-down with LaCivita, is considered a key consultant for the party and campaign’s messaging on abortion.
The truth is that the Trump campaign could use more surrogates, many of whom were blacklisted from the news networks after the 2020 campaign. Sure, there are a handful of not-particularly-compelling electeds auditioning for vice president or cabinet positions, like Elise Stefanik, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton. But in general, there’s an aversion by the mainstream players to platforming election deniers—an issue that played out most memorably, last week, with NBC’s whirlwind hiring and firing of McDaniel. (NBC’s Garrett Haake did, however, record a one-on-one interview with Lara last week, which was considered a coup inside the R.N.C. for getting the headline quote that the 2020 election is “in the past.”) CNN’s roster of Republican contributors mostly hail from the pre-Trump days. MSNBC talent rely on reporter interactions with Trump supporters to tap into the id of the 74 million people who voted for him four years ago. Even Fox is hesitant to allow the real MAGA dingbats in front of the camera after settling the Dominion lawsuit (and with Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation claim still moving toward a trial). On second thought, for the Trump campaign, maybe it’s for the best.
- Teflon Bob: Republicans don’t seem to know what to do with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate whose anti-vax, anti-establishment politics have made him more friends than enemies on the right. Fringe-wing conservatives like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon have recently turned on R.F.K., after initially propping him up, but Trump’s team seems unconcerned by the potential for his third-party bid to siphon off their votes. On the contrary, they’re now messaging that he’s a likely spoiler who takes Black and young votes from Biden. “RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far. He’s a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters,” Trump wrote last week on Truth Social. “I guess this would mean he is going to be taking votes from Crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America.”Democrats aren’t taking chances when it comes to the Kennedy name. The D.N.C.’s anti-third party apparatus, consulted by ubiquitous operative Lis Smith, is ramping up to potentially spend millions of dollars on a response—some of which might be directed toward highlighting the more sordid elements of R.F.K.’s history, including his extramarital affairs and drug use. Of course, a non-establishment voter might not care. In some ways, Trump gave characters like R.F.K. Jr. permission to run.
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| And now, here’s Abby Livingston with her congressional dispatch from Capitol Hill… |
| A MESSAGE FROM META |
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| Cataracts are the primary cause of avoidable blindness.FundamentalVR and Orbis International created a VR training platform that helps surgeons practice cataract surgery.
As a result, more surgeons have access to the training they need to treat cataracts around the world.
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| Texas Civil War & Menendez Family Values |
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As primary season picks up, two incumbents—one Republican and one Democrat—are in the political fights of their lives. Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales and New Jersey Rep. Rob Menendez (yes, he’s the son of that Bob Menendez) face formidable challenges over the next two months. But at the same time, both men are seeing their friends rally behind them via campaign contributions. I dug into the latest F.E.C. filings for more…
- Might vs. right: Gonzales, a third-term Republican who represents Texas’ sprawling 23rd District, is under fire from the far right, both in his state and nationally—as evidenced by Matt Gaetz skipping the House G.O.P. conference retreat to campaign against Gonzales… in his own district. Ordinarily, and especially in the Trump era, an incumbent forced into a runoff might be written off as a dead man walking. But Gonzales seems to have been preparing for this fight ever since 2022, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, when he was the only House Republican to back the gun bill sponsored by senior Texas Senator John Cornyn.In fact, the latest F.E.C. reports show that Gonzales has consistently outraised Brandon Herrera, his opponent in the Republican runoff. The reports show a crush of Republicans lining up to give to Gonzales over the last year. Donors include fellow Republican incumbents facing tough reelections (David Valadao, Jennifer Kiggans), House leadership (Mike Johnson, Elise Stefanik, and Steve Scalise), senators (Cornyn and Thom Tillis), fellow Texans (Jodey Arrington, Dan Crenshaw, August Pfluger, Randy Weber, Monica de la Cruz, and ex-Reps. Van Taylor and Lamar Smith), Republicans from the institutionalist wing (David Joyce and Stephanie Bice) and even a former presidential candidate (Nikki Haley).
Moreover, he got contributions from big-time Texas donors H. Ross Perot Jr., Harlan Crow, John Nau III, and Javaid Anwar—which could portend a major injection to his super PAC, too. In fact, that money is already pouring in (although the donors remain unclear); the Congressional Leadership Fund is spending $1.6 million on behalf of Gonzales ahead of the May 28 primary.
- Friends in low places: Meanwhile, over in New Jersey, Rep. Menendez is in real trouble. Not only has his primary opponent, Ravi Bhalla, raised more money, per the most recent F.E.C. filings, but Menendez has also been hit with the double whammy of the indictment of his father, Sen. Bob Menendez, and the subsequent destabilization of the state political machine. The younger Menendez now has to run without the Jersey ballot line that has given him preferential treatment in the past.Despite his father’s legal trouble, however, Rep. Menendez’s colleagues have stepped up bigly. There’s loads of help from the Jersey delegation (Bonnie Watson Coleman, Frank Pallone, Bill Pascrell, and Donald Norcross—the brother of South Jersey political boss George Norcross) as well as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (Robert Garcia, Nanette Barragán and Sen. Ben Ray Luján) and former and current leadership (Steny Hoyer and Katherine Clark). And oh yeah, a check from New Jersey’s senior senator—his twice-indicted father.
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| And finally, the main event… |
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| Barbarians at the Gates |
| The hottest commodity in the world of megadonors is Rory Gates, the spotlight-averse, socially awkward 24-year-old scion of Bill and Melinda—an overnight sensation among Democratic donor-hustlers desperate for the next big thing. |
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| It’s rare that the heir to one of the world’s most spectacular fortunes should also be a 24-year-old Capitol Hill staffer, laboring in the bowels of some dreary congressional office building. Alas, for Rory Gates, anonymity was never an option. From the moment he arrived in Washington to begin his doctorate, in 2022, the bookish son of Bill and Melinda Gates has been a rich target for Democratic social-climbers, influence-peddlers, and all variety of money chasers who view him not only as a next-generation megadonor and Washington player, but also as their next potential payday.The widespread fascination with someone born in 1999 speaks to the sorry state of Democratic megadonor-dom in 2024. There are virtually no new major givers to progressive causes, at least relative to 2020 or 2016. Sure, there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the Biden campaign and Democratic causes this cycle. But the top of the fundraising pyramid has been eroding over the last few years, sending ripples of concern (and even some layoffs) through the progressive movement. That’s why, whenever I ask sources who’s hot in donor circles, there is only one answer: Have you met Rory?
Nor surprisingly, perhaps, Rory has quickly acquired a mystique that far surpasses both his accomplishments and ostensible interests, according to the dozen-plus people I talked with for this piece. Everyone who sees his surname takes the meeting, of course. “He appeared on our scene like a creature no one was trying to scare off,” said one person who has sought to cultivate him. But on the cocktail party circuit, there is a creeping sense of disillusionment with Rory—a belief that he has wasted too many people’s time; is cautious to the point of being scared of his own shadow; and that the boy prince’s study of the world of money-in-politics has been little more than an academic chin-stroking mission masquerading as a master plan. Democrats I spoke to struggled to identify what he has actually funded. I’ve learned of a couple mid-six-figure contributions, and he’s expressed a desire to fund a select few major, legacy-defining causes rather than spraying and praying.
But he has a long runway, and is in no rush. Gates is barely out of school and working his first real job, as a congressional analyst—hardly the profile of a Democratic donor-savior. If party operatives are expecting him to single-handedly rescue each of their pet causes, they might want to wait a few years. Still, it’s impossible for Democrats not to fixate on the money Rory can access—his father has promised to give away “virtually all” of his wealth to the family foundation—and how to keep him close. Big-money operatives hover around up-and-coming donors like vultures; some want the official business of serving as that person’s advisor, while others just want to be a friend with informal access. And Rory, if he inherits even a sliver of the fortune from his parents, could be their biggest meal ticket yet. |
| A MESSAGE FROM META |
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| “VR let me practice hundreds of times before I operated on a patient.”Dr. Baid used FundamentalVR and Orbis International's VR platform for additional training in a hands-on environment.
In the past year, Dr. Baid has performed 300 life-changing surgeries to preserve her patients' vision.
Discover other stories. |
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| Uncovering even basic information about the heirs to billion-dollar fortunes can be a Sisyphean task: Family office handlers expend substantial resources to scrub information from the internet, in part due to legitimate security and kidnapping concerns. Reporters generally avoid writing about minors. Even identifying where they work or go to school can be perceived by allies as invasive.But the growing power of billionaire scions, from David and Megan Ellison in Hollywood to Rory and Reed Jobs in the overlapping world of politics and tech, is a legitimate topic of conversation—and one that will only metastasize as the children of the ’90s internet billionaires come into their own as cultural tastemakers, philanthropists, and bona fide political forces. The volume of intergenerational wealth that will be transferred over the coming decades is likely to be unprecedented in world history.
All three Gates kids—including daughters Phoebe and Jennifer—are fully aware of that legacy, according to people who know them, and cognizant that their last name, in particular, is a philanthropic brand. But where Bill and Melinda, until recently, famously swore off politics as a distraction to their work of saving lives around the globe, the kids sharply disagree. Phoebe, who is about to graduate from Stanford, has a giving “allowance” that enables her to make gifts that far outstrip those of a typical college senior. She has her own advisors in Melinda’s office to help her make decisions (primarily Josh Lozman), and has made max-out disclosed political contributions to female Democratic governors, including as Laura Kelly and Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom were also backed by her mom. A few weeks ago, I’m told, Phoebe’s team had a private meeting with the C.E.O. of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson. It is hard to imagine any other 21-year-old donor’s squad getting that audience.
Phoebe, who has 400,000 followers on Instagram and 250,000 on TikTok, apparently has designs on being a fashion influencer, à la her friend Eve Jobs. Like her older sister, Jennifer, a doctor, Phoebe is far more comfortable than Rory in the public eye: She spoke at the Gates Foundation’s high-profile Goalkeepers event last year, has recently become a fixture in The Daily Mail (she recently dated a McCartney grandkid), and regularly talks about abortion rights and political advocacy with women’s media. “I see this election coming up as you have one candidate who respects our rights, and you have another who’s taking them away,” she said in an interview last month.
Rory, who has been described to me as almost terrified of attention, is Phoebe’s polar opposite. Indeed, I have rarely encountered anyone more circumspect about the media. People around Rory protect him as if he were still a child—but he’s an academically accomplished adult with political ambitions who can certainly handle some scrutiny. (Several people said he presents as much younger than his age.) At times, he has been extraordinarily cautious about his security. This feels like a good place to note that Rory declined an interview request, and both Bill and Melinda’s teams chose not to help with this story. Several other sources declined interview requests after hearing from Rory’s team that they weren’t supposed to talk to me. His Instagram, unlike Phoebe’s and Jennifer’s, is private. |
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| Gates, despite his aversion to the spotlight, has been interested in the hurly-burly of politics for several years. Before graduating from the University of Chicago in 2022, where he received a B.A. and a masters, Gates interned both with Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign and at Democratic tech firms Hawkfish, founded by Mike Bloomberg, and HaystaqDNA. This past December, he completed his masters work at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate program in D.C., where he specialized in international relations. (He is finishing his doctoral dissertation while he works on the Hill.) In recent conversations, he has described a new academic fascination with the power of propaganda, including how it is used by white nationalists.After he graduated from college, Gates began a listening tour, seeking out Democratic family friends for advice and to build connections. If you didn’t meet with Rory Gates in the 12-month period from mid-2022 to mid-2023, that says something about you and not something about him. In these conversations, Rory asked everyone in the world of Democratic tech: What is the one thing I could do to most help the party? In late 2022, Rory attended a meeting of the Democracy Alliance, where, of course, his presence was much-scrutinized by the chattering class.
These tech geeks were equally elated when he decided to fly to Atlanta for a meeting on the sidelines of a political technology conference attended by some major donors in January 2023. That meeting was probably the peak of the Rory hype. There, he expressed some interest in backing a new project assembled by the Democratic Data Exchange called MIG. Gates has financially supported some work done by DDX, I’m told. |
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| After briefly expressing an interest in investing in the Democratic data giant TargetSmart last year, Rory went deep into diligence on an attempt to buy a progressive tech startup called Deck, as I reported at the time. But Deck was owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, and the startup got caught up in FTX-related bankruptcy proceedings. Rory decided that attaching himself even loosely to the S.B.F. dumpster fire was too toxic for his brand. The company eventually went under. (Like S.B.F., Gates is hardly a dogmatic liberal: He cut a max-out check to Nikki Haley in early 2023, well before it was fashionable at Cafe Milano, and I hear has backed some work at the heterodox Niskanen Center.)Around this time in his bildungsroman, Rory was advised on Democratic affairs by Sheila Gulati, a venture capitalist and a friend of the Gates family—several people referred to her as his “chaperone”—who had zero experience in politics. But in the middle of last year, around the time of the Deck talks, Rory switched things up and enlisted donor-advisor Seth London to help him more formally understand the world of political engagement. Hiring London, to me, signaled a more serious interest in how the game of politics is played, and that he was going to spend enough to justify the cost of retaining a professional.
Rory, befitting his status as Silicon Valley royalty, has collected high-powered mentors out of a concern, particularly from his family but also from some sympathetic Democrats, that he is at risk of being swindled by grifters. Hillary Clinton, who is friends with the Gates family, spent some time with him in the early days. Another person who is said to have offered guidance is Ron Conway, the ubiquitous Bay Area political impresario who is close with Bill. Conway’s celebrated aide-de-camp, Mike Yang, has made some key connections for Rory across the Democratic ecosystem. Rory has also expressed interest in taking advice from other next-gen donors, and he has consulted one a decade or two his senior on how to present to the world: Alex Soros.
Rory remains as concerned about publicity as ever—he has flatly told some people he is uninterested in disclosed giving—but his interests have broadened since his initial tunnel-vision on technology. One area of interest appears to be Texas: Rory has told people that he sees the state as strategically important to the left, and has funded programs there and research into what would be needed to transform the state’s political valence. Another area of interest is the power of media, both owned and paid, to persuade voters: At one point, I’m told, Rory spent some face time with senior Democratic leaders to pitch them on what he saw as a better way to measure the effectiveness of television ads. I hear he’s been financing a bunch of pilot research projects to test propositions like that.
Rory’s fans say that he displays an uncommon humility—he’s an introvert, and is loath to speak his mind at a dinner party, even with policy wonks. But he has a voracious appetite for intel: He likes to ask political and nonprofit operatives for the research papers that underlie their assertions. He’s most curious about policy, leading some to think that, at the end of all of this, he’ll throw away the artifice of being a megadonor and just go work at a think tank, himself, or just create his own. “He has the ability to use the resources he has—or will have—to learn more about things that he’s curious about,” said one person who has talked with him. |
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| I had to laugh when I heard that Rory, rather than launch his own shingle, had instead taken a job last year as a congressional analyst for the committee researching the two-decade conflict in Afghanistan. “We have a brilliant cadre of young analysts performing research on the Afghanistan war for the commission including Rory,” said Matt Gobush, a spokesman for the committee. (Of course, Gobush knew what I was calling about before I even named Rory as the topic of my inquiry. The handlers are everywhere.)Obviously, Rory didn’t have to take a low-ranking job on the Hill. Allies argue it’s very revealing that he chose to do this while working on his PhD and his political giving, a statement that he’s interested in the nitty-gritty of policymaking above all else and not coasting on his privilege. In private conversations, Rory has been prone to describe his political work as in service of his interest in foreign policy; maybe, he has told people, he could build a tool so powerful that an entity like the C.I.A. or the State Department would need to hire him to operate it. After all, he has told others that he was interested in a job in the Biden administration.
And indeed, gradually, over the last few months, the kid has been popping up more and more, just like any other aspiring, over-educated mover-and-shaker in the nation’s capital. He has been SPOTTED in Washington on three occasions by Playbook, hosted an A.I.-related event thrown by Tammy Haddad and a book party for David Petraeus at the British ambassador’s residence. Last October, in a sign of his activity and influence, Rory scored an invite to a White House state dinner honoring the prime minister of Australia, bringing as a guest the son of the president of the Illinois State Senate. The other week, he went to a dinner thrown by Steve Clemons, and I’ve heard that he’s comfortable giving contacts his number when he’s out. Perhaps he wouldn’t be the first young person seduced to Washington with high-minded goals only to never, ever leave. |
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| FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT |
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| Leon Black Speaks |
| Inside the former Apollo chief’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. |
| WIILLIAM D. COHAN |
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| The Perfume Wars |
| A close look at the lucrative business of fragrance dupes. |
| RACHEL STRUGATZ |
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