Chase Koch is one of those billionaires who blends into a crowd without much effort—whether he's mingling with his family’s super-rich friends or the paper-pushing nerds in think tank circles, whether he's talking about the success rates of addiction recovery programs or an epic eight-hour Phish show he attended while in college. It’s not until he casually notes that his family’s reach helped him set up a conversation about the war on drugs between Snoop Dogg and his father, the 90-year-old billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, that you realize this 48-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, truly represents the next generation of raw power—one as comfortable talking Pink Floyd as principles-based management.
“My father had me, as a young man, studying Milton Friedman. He was a big fan of his. And Milton Friedman said the greatest mistake is to judge programs and projects based on intent, not results,” Koch tells me. “And so our approach to social change has always been about real results that help people and move the needle.”
Chase Koch does not linger on that largesse. Instead he brushes it off as almost a rounding error. “If you look at our overall efforts in politics, it's less than 10% of what we do across all the community efforts. Over 90% is community-based solutions,” he says. (Still, that 10% is more than almost every other player in electoral politics. The Koch network spent a gobsmacking $550 million on the 2024 election cycle alone.)
“School reform is an example of where we've focused a lot of efforts,” Koch says. “Just in the last five or six years, we've helped, I think it's now 28 states, really get some form of school choice.”
Their marquee effort, Stand Together, has cobbled together an unlikely coalition of business titans, celebrities, and community activists to tackle everything from criminal justice reform and education inequality to lowercase-L liberalism and uppercase-C capitalism. Meanwhile, Chase Koch’s Key Change initiative and his Believe in People organization are scaling up and have already churned out more than $400 million in projects.
TIME: You're building a long-term approach to solving or addressing the underlying causes of major societal problems here. Can you walk me through how you came to that approach?
So I think a big, big thing that's different about our approach is we've learned a lot in business about what works. How do you get a return on your investment? How do you eliminate waste? How do you continually pivot? And so those business principles we've brought into our social change efforts. We bet on people that are closest to the problem and that have been through the problem because we believe that they are the solution to the problem, not problems to be solved. That's a big differentiator.
The leverage that you get from a community-based approach, that's why we call it Stand Together. It’s multiple leaders on a specific issue in a specific community to ultimately drive movements. And I would say that's the last differentiator, is that mindset of, yes, of course we want to help and optimize on the margin, but we're looking for movement like nationwide movement results to change, to, to really help people, you know, movements of millions, if you will. So that's, that's what I would say long term. And then our model of our partnership model on our principle based model is really what sets us apart.
During COVID, obviously we had addiction rates skyrocketing. Prior to COVID, we found a gentleman named Scott Strode who was founder of a group called The Phoenix in Colorado. He battled addiction his whole life but he had a mentor who showed him that exercise, getting on a bike and getting in a boxing ring, was what was going to help him overcome his issue. And it worked for him. And so he said, If it worked for me, why will this not work at scale for others as well? And he built his first gym in Colorado that basically leveraged the power of community and bringing people together, plus the power of exercise.
We're also very creative in how we tap different communities to really put gas on the fire when something's really working. I'm very, very passionate about music and the power of music to unite people. And so we brought 1 Million Strong to the music industry. Obviously one of the biggest problems in that community is addiction. Not just artists that are on the road all the time, but the crews, folks in the music industry. We built partnerships with folks like Mike Rapino from Live Nation, iHeart Media, AEG at Coachella and Stage Coach. We've leveraged the power of music to build a movement.
Right? You're talking about succession? It's never a pleasant thought, but it's not something that we shy away from. I think this principle-based approach enables us to hopefully be successful for multiple generations.
To hit the elephant in the room, my father's 90. Hopefully we have another 30 years with him 'cause he's in great shape and very healthy. But he would say, Look, if I'm gone tomorrow, I feel great about this.
It would be really easy to just be a dilettante in this situation and only care about Number One. Why not just do that? Why keep the movement going?
In this country we have a crisis of purpose, a crisis of meaning. And what we believe is these principles, when applied, people see that it can transform their lives and give them more meaning. So we're playing the long game here, there's no doubt about it. But we feel like we've got the capability to do it.
Your family's associated with the libertarian wing of this country's politics and there's no avoiding that. Do you see this going forward? There was a break during Trump 1.0, but there's been a noticeable pivot here. Can you walk me through what's behind that and where we should be watching going forward about the political involvement of this network?
But I will say that policy, great policy, is critical to remove barriers for the most people. School reform is an example of where we've focused a lot of efforts and just in the last five or six years, we've helped, I think it's now 28 states, really get some form of school choice, which is absolutely critical to have a lot of alternatives that meet kids' needs.
Do you worry that the political overtones of your family overshadow the 90% of the work that you're doing outside of the political realm?
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