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It's the naivete that staggers me about all this, what reason could there be to give other people your money and just let them do their own thing? Who trusts some random 'professional manager' in a suit before their own flesh and blood children they've personally raised over decades?
It's really not that hard to manage investments. These 'expert' active managers aren't much good at it either compared to index funds, a decent person could just read a few books on risk management and do fine.
It's not hard to pick out things you want to support either. Obviously there's a level of discipline and taste involved if you want to maximize cost-efficiency. That is genuinely skill-intensive. But people on the left don't worry about waste or squandering, Bezos's ex wife is just shovelling money into the faces of progressives without regard for careful strategy. It all goes back through into their cadres anyway, so it's hard to truly squander money... Spending money is just about the easiest job in the world.
So you're sold the story that it'll always be your family foundation. You're in control, you set the mission statement, you pick the board, your kids will be on it. But, over time, there's a lot of social pressure to let the right people on the board (if you have other big donors, they'll insist on putting their people on the board, that's "just how it's done"). And then, all of a sudden, the board has total control of "interpreting" your "mission", goodbye and don't forget to wipe the urine off grandpa's grave on the way out. Rich people are infinitely more naïve about using their money than you'd think. If you want to avoid that, you have to make the 501c3 a disposable entity so that you can dispose of the board with it.
It's actually far harder to spend that much money than one would assume, too. You have to hire experienced finance guys just to get it out the door on a reasonable schedule, and that's probably one reason these things swing so hard to the left. The institutional left is a gaping maw for money. They have an infinite recruiting pool for potential salaries, or at least as infinite as there are underemployed kids with fake majors, and you rarely have to worry about them actually achieving their goals because reality is in the way. I have no idea the extent to which the tax code was written for that purpose, but it sure did serve the long-term goals of the various people who made 501c3s what they are today (including the dearly beloved then-Speaker Johnson, known as an idealist who would never twist public policy for personal ends).
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