$185 million in current gifts: Henry and Susan Samueli’s philanthropy is over the $1.1 billion mark
The $185 million belongs to a year, not a night.
If the Samueli Foundation keeps its present pace, Henry and Susan Samueli will have signed away about that much in 2026—not in one envelope, not under one spotlight, but in a long sequence of grants that pay for roofs and school buses and cancer benches and Jewish life and the dull, necessary wiring of Orange County nonprofits.
Six dollars in ten stay in the county they never left.
A striking share of the rest goes to people trying to keep Jews safe in America and in Israel.
Lindsey Spindle’s name is riding the local headline because she is the one who has to land the plane.
She did not build the plane. Henry did that in a Redondo Beach condominium in 1991, with Henry Nicholas, ten thousand dollars, and a stubborn faith that moving pictures down a cable could also move the world.
He was the son who stocked whiskey on Whittier Boulevard while his parents, Sala and Aron, rebuilt a life the war had tried to erase.
Aron had been a dentist in Poland; Buchenwald put him to work.
Sala hid in an attic and walked back after liberation to the blood where her brothers had been.
They met in the wreckage, had Leon in Germany, crossed the ocean with almost nothing, and opened a liquor store in Los Angeles.
Henry built radios in the junior-high shop instead of the assigned crystal set.
He soldered.
He entered UCLA at sixteen and did not stop until the doctorate in electrical engineering was his.
Broadcom went public in 1998.
The money arrived like weather.
He is seventy-two now, off the chairman’s seat at Broadcom since June, still on the board, still the man who bought the Anaheim Ducks from Disney because a hockey team, like a chip, is a complicated machine you can love.
Susan is the other half of the signature.
San Fernando Valley, Jewish household, mathematics at Berkeley in 1972, thirteen years at IBM writing code and selling mid-range systems when that was still a rare room for a woman.
She left to raise three children and followed a quieter obsession—nutrition, homeopathy, Chinese herbs, and the idea that a body is not a billing code.
Friends used to come to her when antibiotics had wrecked a child.
The $200 million that put their names on a college of health sciences at UC Irvine is her argument, written in stone and faculty lines.
Judaism is the ground they share without translation.
He has said it. She has said it. You can hear it in the checks.
They live in Newport Beach.
They signed Warren Buffett’s pledge in 2012 and then, unlike a great many pledgers, accelerated.
The foundation they created after the IPO is not a mountain of endowment throwing off five percent.
At the end of 2024, it held about $62 million and took in more than $102 million from them.
The $185 million only happens if they keep opening the tap.
When Spindle walked in, in 2022, the annual giving was $18.8 million—serious money in any other living room, a rounding error in theirs.
She came from Jeffrey Skoll’s world, from the “truth” ads that made teenagers put down cigarettes, and from No Kid Hungry, from a first lunch with the Samuelis that lasted more than three hours.
She was a Washington child, one of the first girls through Lawrenceville, Michigan; after that, she married David, now in San Clemente, with a Boston terrier named Mochi and a grandfather’s memory: a German immigrant who volunteered at the Holocaust Museum and on suicide hotlines.
She has said the job felt like a calling because she had never before been asked to change the sidewalks under her own feet.
Henry and Susan praise her the way people praise a pilot in bad weather. The tax form pays her. It pays them nothing.
What she did, with their permission, was take the locks off.
A needs study asked Orange County nonprofits what they actually lacked.
The answers were unglamorous: a roof, a twenty-four-seat bus, outrigger canoes for veterans who cannot sleep, staff who have been running on fumes, a building that will not leak in the next rain.
They named one fund Breakaway, a hockey word, unrestricted grants of fifty to a hundred thousand. They named another Build OC, real capital, land and drywall.
Two cycles have put more than $32 million into 235 organizations.
Last time, 1,108 groups asked for $263 million and eighty-nine of them went home with $15 million.
A third fund now pays neighbors to stop competing and start sharing a bookkeeper. Six community colleges are splitting about $24 million so a student who cannot see a four-year campus can still finish a STEM credential and walk into a wage.
Santa Ana College just took $2.21 million for culinary and automotive labs—electric, hybrid, and diesel—the largest private gift that campus foundation has ever held.
None of it sparkles. All of it is how a county remains a county.
Then there is the Jewish ledger, which is not a side account.
Spindle told the Orange County Business Journal that about 40 percent of this year’s giving is going to organizations fighting antisemitism here and in Israel.
In July the foundation placed $42.25 million on the table after funding the first serious demographic portrait of Orange County Jewry — $36 million to thicken local life, $6.25 million to keep the line to Israel from going thin.
Federation, the Merage JCC, Hillel, the Jewish camp, Birthright, and the ADL: the usual names, funded at an unusual scale.
In Petah Tikva they added $50 million this year to a cancer institute at Beilinson that already carried their name and an earlier $25 million.
Whether that last gift sits inside the $185 million or beside it is a clerk’s question.
The intent is not.
Spindle, who is not Jewish, helped raise more than $200 million through the Har Initiative with Fay Twersky of the Arthur Blank family—har, mountain—because the Samuelis’ Jewish giving was one of the first things she noticed and could not put down.
Chapman University has a Holocaust library named for Sala and Aron.
Irvine has a Jewish campus with their name on the gate. Santa Ana has a charter high school for foster and underserved kids. UCLA and UC Irvine have engineering schools that say Samueli when you walk in.
Anaheim has a hockey team and a four-billion-dollar bet called OCVibe rising around the arena.
The $185 million is none of those monuments.
It is this year’s weather: a couple in their seventies, children of a liquor store, and a Valley living room, deciding that the fortune from the chips in the walls should not wait for a funeral.
The headline will keep saying Spindle, and she has earned the ink.
The checks still say, Henry and Susan.