Who the heck is Giants owner Arthur Rock anyway?

Probably the Giants owner who's led the most influential life, to be honest

This is the sixteenth installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, medical technology investor David Schnell, radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (now no longer listed as an owner), lady of mystery Nancy Olsen, Republican super-donor Charles Johnson, Manila business mogul George Drysdale, charter school supporter Paul Wythes, Jr., Hong Kong real estate guy Philip Morais, former professional athlete Buster Posey, Rich Tech Guy Aneel Bhusri, private equity fund Arctos Sports Partners, Hawaiian real estate mogul Duane Kurisu, finance/charter school guy John Scully, and family business real estate mogul William Chang. Let’s take a look at the big board!

Every time I see it, it just gets more resplendent.

Today’s victim: Arthur Rock, who turns out to have lived quite a life, as he was one of the most notable figures in the finance world back in the ‘60s, and was even a Time Magazine cover model:

Arthur Rock was born on August 19, 1926, the son of an immigrant father and a first-generation mother. His father was a Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrant who owned a corner store, where Arthur worked when he was young. Arthur Rock went into the Army in 1944, but “didn’t serve very much,” and enrolled at Syracuse after the war, majoring in political science and finance. He then worked for a year at Vick’s, whose Vapor Rub you might be familiar with, and then enrolled at Harvard Business School, where he got his MBA in 1951.

Rock went on to work for a couple of investment firms on Wall Street, but his first big moment came in 1957, when a group of engineers who were working for William Shockley — who had won a Nobel Prize for working on semiconductors and inventing the first transistor — left his employ because he was awful to work for (he would spend the last couple decades of his life espousing wildly racist viewpoints, back when that kind of thing was frowned upon) and got in touch with Rock. Rock, after going through dozens of other options, eventually secured money for them to start a semiconductor company under the umbrella of a company called Fairchild Camera and Instrument. The company, called Fairchild Semiconductors — the first to work solely in silicon — was a success, and Rock had his blueprint.

Rock moved to San Francisco in 1961, where he would fund several other nascent technology companies (including Teledyne, which in 2024 had revenues of $5.67 billion), eventually securing the money for a spinoff of Fairchild Semiconductors, which was called Intel. Not only did Rock raise $2.5 million in an astonishingly short window of time to get Intel started, but he also pioneered the compensation structure for startup employees, giving stock options to employees who had been there for at least one year at low prices, which would vest after four years.

Later, Rock would also go on to become one of the earliest investors in Apple Computer, which was a pretty savvy move.

This was the beginning of the venture capital structure of Silicon Valley, and also the beginning of Silicon Valley itself. Rock, in fact, is credited with inventing the term “venture capital” to describe financial structures that did not exist before he got Mr. Fairchild to take a chance on semiconductors.

Rock spent decades as a successful investor, and while I’ve seen some hints that his firm — Arthur Rock and Co — is closed, I can’t find any information about when that might have happened. However, since he is 98 years old, it stands to reason that he’s probably not a full time venture capitalist anymore.

What he Arthur Rock is doing right now, though, is giving his money away. In addition to being a big fan of charter schools, as Giants owners seem legally obligated to be, Rock is also a very big donor to the Democratic Party. He gave to multiple congressional candidates during the last election cycle, he gave each state Democratic Party more than $1,000 in 2023, and he made a $500,000 contribution to the Future Forward PAC in 2024, which tried very hard for an election result which would have been objectively better than the one we got.

Rock is also a longtime Giants fan, with that Time Magazine profile from 1984 mentioning it in the first paragraph. It’s not really a surprise, then, that he was part of Peter Magowan’s original ownership team that kept the Giants in San Francisco in 1993, and he’s been an owner ever since. I haven’t been able to find an interview in which he’s mentioned the Giants, but basically every interview with him is some variety of “Tell me about these business events from several decades ago,” so there probably just isn’t time to get into the important stuff.

As you might expect, Rock has scores of awards to his name, including being a member of the California Business Hall of Fame, the Bay Area Business Council Hall of Fame, the Private Equity Hall of Fame, and the Junior Achievement Hall of Fame. He did invest at least some money with Bernie Madoff, but it’s tough to tell if that was his money or a client’s, and whether that was in the Ponzi scheme, and how much money he lost. He was also portrayed by JK Simmons in the movie Jobs — have I mentioned that he took Steve Jobs to his first opera? I haven’t? Oh. It was Tosca — which is as great an honor as you can hope for.

Rock has been on dozens of boards of directors. His wife, Toni Rembe, has a theater named after her in Union Square. Together, they have set up multiple education endowments and have set up a center for corporate governance at Stanford and a distinguished professorship at UCSF. Arthur Rock has made lots of money and now does whatever he wants with it. If anything is the American Dream, it’s that.