Jerry Jones’ $10 Million Clinton Foundation Gift (Getty Images)
Jerry Jones has given $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Forbes puts Jones’s net worth at $23.2 billion, but this donation has little to do with football. He said he hoped their work would help young Arkansans, including student-athletes and students, as KATV ABC 7 reported.
The Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager announced the gift at the Little Rock Touchdown Club in Arkansas, his home state. Jones announced the gift himself and spoke straight to Clinton while doing it.
The Clinton Foundation said the money will pay for modernization work at the Clinton Presidential Center and benefit the Clinton School of Public Service. “Understanding that the state of Arkansas, Little Rock, North Little Rock and the University of Arkansas have all been at the core of our family’s experience while providing the landscape and foundation that formed and helped shape our lives and success, this is a remarkably heartfelt moment,” Jones said in a statement. He grew up in nearby North Little Rock. The money will go toward modernizing the Clinton Presidential Center and supporting the Clinton School of Public Service, both in Little Rock. It is about home, and the place that made him. Both sit in Little Rock. The focus is education, and the audience is Arkansas. Jones made the family connection plain in his statement.
That separates this gift from some of his earlier ones, which went to Dallas and Arlington causes. The Clinton Foundation confirmed it on Monday.
The magazine puts the Cowboys at $17 billion, the most in the NFL, well above the Los Angeles Rams at $13.5 billion in second place. For perspective, $10 million is about 0.04 percent of his reported net worth.
Jones built his early success as a wildcatter, according to Forbes, and earned his first million in oil investments in the 1970s. The size of the gift fits his standing. Forbes ranks Jones ninth among the richest U.S. sports team owners. The money behind it started in oil. He still invests in drilling, along with retail and residential real estate projects in and around the Dallas area. So the checks come from a portfolio that reaches well beyond the NFL. Read his statement again and one thing stands out. In the lines he gave, the Cowboys never come up. Jones lists Little Rock, North Little Rock and the University of Arkansas first, then moves to students. For the owner of the NFL’s most valuable team, that is a quiet choice.