Who the heck is Giants owner Nancy Olsen?

I hope you know, because I sure don't

This is the sixth 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, and radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (Art to his friends). Time to look at the big board!

Spectacular.

Today, we’re going to profile Nancy Olsen, who, uh…

Well…

“Profile” might be a bit strong of a word here.

It is nearly impossible to find any public information on Nancy Olsen. Here is a complete list of information about her that I am 100% sure is true:

• Nancy Olsen is a minority owner of the San Francisco Giants baseball club

That’s it. I do, however, have one thing that I am extremely confident in, which opens up a few more possibilities:

• Nancy Olsen used to be known as Nancy House

The Giants ownership group has been listed on the Giants website for a number of years. Why, that’s how I got the earth-shattering Big Board that you see at the beginning of every entry in this series. There is a site on this here Internet called the Wayback Machine, which will show you how most websites looked in the past. Sometimes, this can tell you a story.

For example, on April 13, 2016, Nancy House was listed as a Giants owner. The next time the Wayback Machine archived the Front Office site was June 18, 2016, when Nancy House was gone, but Nancy Olsen suddenly appeared. I think it stands to reason that these are the same person, especially considering that this sketchy site on which you can look up information on people by paying money lists “Nancy K Olsen” and “Nancy K Olsen House” as other names for a 71-year-old named “Nancy House.”

So then, easy peasy, what do we know about this “Nancy House?”

…Almost as little.

Nancy House bought into the Giants in the year 2000 at the same time as John Scully, with their combined investment totaling $7.7 million. While the Chronicle’s article at the time calls them both fans, it has nothing else to say about Nancy House, instead focusing on Scully.

The one place she does show up is in the lede of a Washington Post article about minority team owners in general. Around 1999, she had made an offhand comment at a party that she’d always wanted to own an MLB team, and a couple weeks later, the person she made the comment to asked her if she wanted a piece of the Giants. She said yes and as a result, got to sit in cool seats (that she did still have to pay for), meet the players during Spring Training, and got to fly on the team plane (and also go to the World Series, which is pretty neat).

At the time, she owned less than one percent of the team, which was said to be worth almost $400 million; if she and John Scully each bought equal shares at the time (not a given, admittedly), then her investment would have been $3.85 million. If the value of the team had risen between her investment in 2000 and the Post article publishing in 2003, then she probably bought in for less, and Scully for more.

The last nugget from the Post article is that Nancy House’s ex-husband “made millions in the computer chip business.” Is that where all of her money came from? Or did she make plenty of her own money elsewhere? There’s no way to know.

For example, in my research, I did find a San Francisco-based chain called Imposters — it sold fake jewelry, hence the name — that a woman named Nancy Olsen founded in the mid-’80s that was apparently very successful for a time. It is technically possible that Nancy Olsen founded that store, got married, changed her name, got divorced, and then changed it back later, but that seemed like a stretch to me. Also, Nancy Olsen’s birth year is a few years off from what the Post claimed Nancy House’s birth year would have been. It’s possible she lied about her age, but not likely, and combined with the other possible-but-unlikelihoods, that seemed like a dead end.

As for political donations, Nancy House repeatedly gave $1,000 to MLB’s Office Of The Commissioner PAC between 2002 and 2010, but as every owner I’ve looked into did that, it’s safe to say it was compulsory. It’s possible she made other donations, but we can’t be sure: a woman named Nancy Olsen donated to ActBlue repeatedly in the mid-to-late 2010s, but she worked at De Anza college, and I don’t think that lines up. Our Nancy Olsen could be the one listed as “Not employed” — she’s 71 and wealthy enough to own part of the Giants, so that tracks — but that could just be someone else. We have no way to know.

And that’s where we have to leave it with Nancy Olsen. We know very little about her. Maybe she’s not interested in being a public person, or maybe no one ever asked. All we have is this: she’s 71 years old. At one point, she was known as Nancy House, and had an ex-husband who did something with computer chips. She owns part of the Giants.

That’s it. That’s all we get. Some people just aren’t too susceptible to a deep dive into Google. For some people, you have to pay the $3.95 for a 7-day trial on one of those record lookup sites, and I, for one, absolutely refuse to do that. To coin a phrase, sometimes you just gotta tip your cap. She’s a hard person to find. Good for her.