$50.5 million and counting: Jack Little’s latest, biggest bet on the Berkshires makes him New England’s most consequential conservation donor

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a place like Palmer Brook — 858 acres of forest, wetland, and a glassy 125-acre lake tucked against the shoulder of October Mountain State Forest in the Berkshires. It’s the kind of quiet that took decades to protect, and now, that quiet has a name attached to it: Jack Little.

Little isn’t a household name outside engineering circles, and that’s exactly how he seems to like it.

He’s the co-founder, CEO, and president of MathWorks, the Natick-based company behind MATLAB and Simulink, the mathematical computing software that quietly underpins the way engineers design everything from jet engines to insulin pumps.

He’s also, as of this week, the man responsible for more than $50.5 million flowing into Mass Audubon’s coffers over the last three years—a run of giving that culminated in a fresh $25.5 million gift, announced the same day the conservation group closed on the Becket land after years of negotiation with a family that had owned it since the 1960s.

To understand why a software executive has become one of the most consequential conservation donors in New England, you have to go back to a rented cabin in the hills above Stanford University in 1984. Little was a graduate student in electrical engineering when he stumbled across a clunky but brilliant matrix-computing tool called MATLAB, built by a University of New Mexico math professor named Cleve Moler for his own students.

Little rewrote the code, recruited a colleague named Steve Bangert to help, and the three of them founded a company to sell it. Little took the titles of president and CEO. For a while, he was also the only employee.

Four decades later, that scrappy startup is a global company with more than 6,500 employees and roughly $1.5 billion in annual revenue — and it has never gone public. That detail matters more than it might seem. MathWorks remains majority-owned by its founders, which means decisions about where the company’s money goes don’t pass through layers of institutional shareholders demanding quarterly returns. They trace back, in large part, to Little himself. He doesn’t just run the company; he sits, unpaid, as president of its charitable foundation, the vehicle through which gifts like this week’s actually get disbursed.

Cleve Moler used to describe the partnership this way: “I am the father of MATLAB, but Jack Little is the father of The MathWorks. He is the spirit and the brains behind the company.” It’s a line that reads differently now than it would have a year ago.

Moler died this past May, at 86, just two months before this latest gift was announced. For four decades, the two men built something together — first a piece of software, then a company, then, more recently, a philanthropic footprint that reshaped land conservation across an entire state.

This is the first major conservation commitment to go out the door since Little lost the person who started it all with him.

The giving didn’t begin this week.

Back in 2023, MathWorks handed Mass Audubon $25 million — structured deliberately, $7 million up front and $3 million a year for six more — in what was, at the time, the single largest programmatic gift in the organization’s 127-year history.

That money became the seed for the 30×30 Catalyst Fund, now the largest land conservation initiative in New England, and it helped spur a separate $75 million private fund that Mass Audubon built to match it. In the three years since, the Catalyst Fund has helped protect or restore nearly 14,000 acres across Massachusetts, from a new wildlife management area in Heath and Colrain to a stretch of forest in Winchendon that a solar developer had been eyeing for clearcutting.

Little has a way of talking about leadership that sounds almost like a philosophy of restraint. He’s fond of a Japanese proverb — the more power you give up, the more power you have — and people who’ve worked with him say it shows: he built a culture at MathWorks that runs on long horizons and quiet confidence rather than splashy moves. It isn’t hard to see that same instinct in how he gives money away.

There’s no MathWorks tower named after him, no gala circuit appearance. Instead there’s a steady, almost engineering-minded approach to philanthropy — identify a well-run partner, commit for years at a time, and let the compounding do the work.

Mass Audubon’s president and CEO, David O’Neill, seemed to sense exactly that when he thanked the company Monday. “This is truly a landmark day, not just for Mass Audubon, but for everyone who benefits from the remarkable generosity of MathWorks,” he said, calling the gift “a game-changer” at a moment when federal climate funding keeps shrinking.

It fell to Jeanne O’Keefe, the company’s chief financial officer, to deliver the company line at the podium in Becket — “MathWorks invests in organizations that deliver meaningful, long-term impact,” she said — but the sentiment sounded, more than anything, like something Little himself has been saying in one form or another since 1984: build something that lasts, and don’t make noise about it.

What lasts, in this case, is a piece of land that used to belong to a private fishing club and will, eventually, belong to everyone. The lodge near the lake could become a nature center.

Trails haven’t been cut yet. Programming hasn’t been designed. For now, Palmer Brook Wildlife Sanctuary is still mostly just quiet acreage, protected but unopened, a promise more than a place.

But that has always been how this story works. An engineer in a rented cabin sees something worth building, commits to it for decades, and only much later do the rest of us get to walk the trails.

Jack Little spent forty years turning a matrix-computing tool into one of the most quietly essential software companies in the world.

Now, land parcel by land parcel, he’s spending a piece of what it built on making sure some of the state he calls home stays wild long after anyone remembers exactly whose money made that possible.