Who the heck is Giants owner John Scully anyway?

A finance guy, sure. But ALSO a charter school guy. He contains multitudes.

This is the fourteenth 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, and Hawaiian real estate mogul Duane Kurisu. Let’s take a look at the big board!

Let’s not mince words: this project is the greatest achievement in American history.

Today’s subject: John Scully, who is no relation to Vin, Dana, or the John who spent a decade with the Atlanta Falcons.

John Scully was born in New York in 1944, to a father who had lost everything in the Depression and a mother who was from Harlem and had been a center on the women’s city basketball team. He describes himself as becoming very interested in money at a young age, starting a lawn mowing business in eighth grade that his friends abandoned as soon as they had made $50, and later, in high school, he made a small amount of money investing in railroad stock, heard about business school, and decided that was the life for him.

Scully went to Princeton, graduated in 1966, and then went to Stanford Business School. After grad school, he took a couple jobs, eventually finding himself at an investment bank in San Francisco, and in 1969, at age 27, he started his own firm, San Francisco Partners, which would later be called SPO Partners. He also spent 20 years, from 1971 to 1991, as a founding general partner of Texas Partners, a separate investing firm.

SPO Partners would have a nearly 50 year run, closing in 2018 as a $5 billion firm. It had thrived by buying stock of undervalued companies, but markets wanted to put their money into big companies in the hopes that they would get bigger, and there wasn’t any room for SPO’s strategy anymore.

But nearly a half-century of running an investment firm means that you’ll have some money to play with, which is how, in 2000, Scully found himself investing in the Giants alongside Nancy House. When the Chronicle asked him for a comment, he said that he’d been a Giants fan growing up in New Jersey, and the team’s run of success and shiny new ballpark convinced him it was time to buy in. It was a good investment. At the time, the Giants were worth $190 million. In 2015, Scully estimated that the team was worth $2 billion.

Politically, in what’s at least a little bit of an upset, Scully is a Democrat. In 2022, he gave money to Gavin Newsom, in 2012, he gave to the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Obama, Kirsten Gillibrand, and some less famous Democrats too. For a successful investment banker, and one who once accepted the Horatio Alger Award, which proudly boasts of having given the same award to Clarence Thomas in the ‘90s, that might not have been my first guess.

Scully also gave $200,000 to charter school supporter Marshall Tuck in 2014, which ties in nicely with his next interest: education. In 1989, Scully founded the Making Waves Foundation, which started as an after school program and in 2007, became its own charter school in Richmond. He is still the co-chair of the Board of Directors, along with his wife, Regina.

Regina, by the way, is a prolific producer of documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated The Invisible War, and also has multiple Emmy nominations to her name. I could say a lot more about her career, but we’re here to talk about her husband, so why get distracted?

The Scullys haven’t restricted their charity to politics and schools, though. Here are just a few more gifts that I was able to find easily: in 2007, they gave a gift that allowed Princeton to construct the Regina and John Scully ‘66 Center for the Neuroscience of Mind and Behavior center (after previous gifts which established Scully Hall, and one which funded a position in the economics department); in 2008, they gave $20 million to Stanford for stem cell research; in 2022, he gave an enormous model railroad to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey; in 2013, they started a foundation of their own, though I haven’t been able to find what that foundation specifically does (or did, if it’s not around anymore).

Scully has served on a number of boards and councils, has received awards, and has been generally successful in life. When he bought in to the Giants, he wasn’t one of the bigger investors, and it’s likely that things have stayed that way, but he probably has enough. He’s done well for himself, and he gets to own a piece of his favorite baseball team from when he was a kid. That’s the dream.