Billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, a Democrat, has said, “Doing business in China is easier than doing business in California.”
Moritz has taken that to heart over the years. The private foundation steering the fortune of the Welsh-born baby boomer is invested, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, in Chinese funds through offshoots of Sequoia Capital, the famous firm that counted him as a partner for 38 years as Moritz spearheaded its expansion into China. That nonprofit group, which controlled $3.8 billion in assets at the close of 2022, helped bankroll a Rockefeller family-led project reportedly used to pressure the Biden administration successfully to pause new approvals for liquefied natural gas export terminals — a decision experts and lawmakers argue poses national security risks and could embolden foreign adversaries.
That Moritz’s San Francisco-based Crankstart Foundation boosted the controversial climate initiative, known as the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas, is an inside look at how wealthy Democrats poured cash into environmental activist hubs that lobbied to choke off new permit approvals for LNG. The Rockefeller Family Fund, a public charity formed by business magnate John D. Rockefeller’s heirs, launched the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas in 2018 with support from ex-Democratic New York Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, Sequoia Climate Fund, and other left-leaning grantmakers.
In turn, the anti-oil-and-gas initiative circulated a memo one year later, in 2019, to gauge interest among other groups in challenging the LNG industry and began cutting checks to allies, the Wall Street Journal reported. President Joe Biden in late January of 2024 froze new export approvals of LNG. Other than the U.S., the top exporters in 2023 were Australia, Qatar, and Russia. Biden climate envoy John Podesta helped shape the LNG pause, and it could benefit his lobbyist brother Tony Podesta’s former and current clients, including Golden Pass LNG, which is co-owned by the state-owned QatarEnergy petroleum company, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“To say it’s a shocking development to the international community is just a massive understatement,” Victoria Coates, ex-deputy White House national security adviser, told the Washington Examiner. “How much were the Chinese advocating for this? Because it removes a huge strategic advantage for the United States, and China is so deeply vested in so-called green energy infrastructure for their solar panels and wind turbines. Clearly, they’re cheering it on. I suspect they played a more active role promoting it.”
Moritz, 69, has given generously to the Democratic American Bridge 21st Century PAC and anti-Donald Trump Lincoln Project, according to Federal Election Commission records. In 2020, the investor and his wife, Harriet Heyman, founded Crankstart, which between 2020 and 2022 further established itself as a heavyweight in the left-wing philanthropy sphere as it distributed more than $570 million combined in grants, tax documents filed with the IRS show.
And in recent years, Crankstart allocated a small slice of that pie, at least $3 million, to the Rockefeller Family Fund. Separately, Moritz’s group wired millions of dollars to prop up climate initiatives through the likes of the Democratic-allied dark money group New Venture Fund, Resources Legacy Fund, Environmental Health Coalition, Earthjustice, and Indigenous Environmental Network.
Crankstart’s grants to the Rockefeller Family Fund were earmarked on tax forms as “general support for the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas.”
Other earmarked financial disclosures reviewed by the Washington Examiner show grants backing the initiative from the Mayer and Morris Kaplan Foundation and the Winslow Foundation, a left-wing environmental group tied to Wren Winslow Wirth — the wife of former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth, a Democrat.
Since 2020, Crankstart has also sent $1.5 million to the Environmental Defense Fund for a Chinese climate project and $7.6 million to New Venture Fund for its Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund.
The Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund was originally established in 2014 under a project of the Democracy Alliance, a powerful donor membership group of left-wing billionaires such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, documents show. In 2020, the CCEEF was honored by Inside Philanthropy as a “climate grantmaker to watch,” along with the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, which reportedly was linked to the Biden LNG pressure campaign.
At the same time, Moritz’s private foundation has reaped a windfall from Chinese investments tied to Sequoia, the Chinese arm of which has long been led by billionaire venture capitalist Neil Shen, whom Moritz recruited in 2005. Sequoia told investors in June 2023 that it planned by March 2024 to split off its China and India businesses over an “increasingly complex” global dynamic, with Shen to lead Sequoia China’s rebranded HongShan.
The announcement came months before the House select China committee in Congress announced a bipartisan investigation into Sequoia-tied investments in Chinese technology companies.
On 2022 tax forms, Crankstart disclosed holdings in the likes of SC China GF Principals Fund I, SC China Growth III PF, and SC China Growth V PF, among other Sequoia-tied funds. The nonprofit group saw investment gains that year total over $114 million and, for instance, acquired a stake in SC China Principals Fund II that it flipped for a gross sales price of $21.5 million.
Meanwhile, in 2022, Moritz gifted $20.9 million to Crankstart, according to tax forms. The funds were routed through donations of non-cash property stock shares in the partially state-owned Chinese video company Kuaishou, China’s Meituan retail company, and Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant that the New York Times reported in 2020 was linked to government surveillance of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.
Crankstart, which did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner, sold roughly 80,000 shares of Alibaba in 2022 for a combined gain of more than $8.8 million. That year, the nonprofit group also offloaded more than 2.1 million shares combined in Meituan and Kuaishou for over $27.5 million.
Larry Behrens, spokesman for the Power the Future energy advocacy group, said billionaires like Moritz work “to undermine American energy independence” while cheerleading for China. Last week, the House passed a bill to reverse Biden’s LNG freeze, but it faces an uphill battle in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“The money trail from American taxpayer dollars to Chinese interests is even more appalling when you see these environmental advocates brag about how it’s better to do business in China than in the U.S.,” Behrens said.
The Rockefeller Family Fund did not reply to a request for comment. Its affiliated Rockefeller Brothers Fund has investments in fossil fuel companies in the U.S. and China despite the group aggressively promoting the green energy agenda, the Washington Examiner reported.
Longtime Rockefeller Family Fund Director Lee Wasserman and other left-wing activists helped coordinate a major investigation into fossil fuel companies in New York that sparked a flurry of climate lawsuits, according to Fox News.
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To Coates, now the vice president for the Heritage Foundation, Biden is handing Russia and its ally, China, an “incredible gift” by pausing LNG exports.
“The bottom line is our partners and allies are baffled and adversaries are pleased,” she said. “That’s never a good formula.”