Who the heck is Giants owner Phil Halperin?
Part 2 in the series
Last time, I introduced my Who The Heck Is This Giants Owner series by focusing on Scott Seligman, who made a lot of money through property ownership and now makes more money through baseball team ownership. That’s one down, so let’s look at the big board!
How exciting!
This time, we’re going to look at Philip (known as Phil) Halperin, who was (unlike Seligman) not part of Peter Magowan’s original Giants ownership group, but came along in 2002 or thereabouts.
Phil Halperin got his A.B. — never listed as a B.A. — in Political Science with Honors from Stanford in 1985, and his MBA with Honors from Harvard in 1990 (Every other source I’ve seen says he finished his undergrad in 1984, but his LinkedIn says otherwise, and I feel like he would know). He was an Associate with the Corporate Finance Department of Lehman Brothers, though that may have been before or concurrent with business school. After Harvard, Halperin worked for three years in the Private Placement Department of Montgomery Securities, after which he joined Weston Presidio Capital, the firm at which he would make Professional Baseball Team Owner money.
Founded in 1991, Weston Presidio is a private equity firm. Halperin spent 10 years there, rising to the level of General Partner. While at Weston Presidio, Halperin focused on information technology, consumer branding, telecommunications and media,” per his Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies profile. This translated to investments in companies like Airspan Networks, a Florida based telecom company; Picarro, a company that makes gas analysis tools; and more well known brands like Restoration Hardware and Guitar Center.
Politically, Halperin has been a Democratic donor since 2002. Back then, he gave in support of Tom Daschle; a couple years later he gave $2,000 to John Kerry, and three years after that he backed Hillary Clinton. After the 2008 primaries, he made several donations to pro-Obama groups, supported a few Democrats running for Congress (including Dianne Feinstein), gave to Obama again in 2012, and then mostly stopped giving until 2019, when he donated $500 to Josh Harder, sent a few bucks here and there to ActBlue ($130 over six donations from 2019-2020), and gave to both Biden (on January 23) and Klobuchar (on February 11) in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Politics isn’t the only area where Halperin gives his money away, though. Since retiring from private equity, philanthropy has been his main job, with the Silver Giving Foundation being his primary outlet (his other big foundation is California Education Partners). Silver Giving Foundation focuses on education — education is a pet project of Phil Halperin — as well as access to democracy and early childhood programs.
Education, though, is the big one, and if I’m being honest I’m not qualified to talk about where that money goes. I found this fairly positive article about how Silver Giving is one of several diverse charities that came together to help reform California education finance. I also found this more skeptical one about how two main aspects of California Education Partners’s core principles — common core and competency-based education — could just be a way to make money off collecting student testing data and then push the privatization of public schools.
It seems kinda doubtful to me that Phil Halperin is in it for those reasons, but on the other hand, I don’t know the man at all, so I wouldn’t make a very good judge.
Halperin has a wife, Maureen, and together they have three children. In 1997, Maureen wrote this short piece for Stanford Magazine about their family life at the time; things have, I assume, changed somewhat since then.
Phil Halperin is also on Instagram! Here, you can see him expressing a heartfelt sentiment about the Giants’ biggest rivals (you might have to click through to see the comment? I’m not 100% on which part of this embeds):
And here are a few more Giants-related Instagrams:
But baseball and philantropy aren’t Halperin’s only passions. There’s one other way that he spends his time (though admittedly, not so much in 2020): he is the house photographer for a number of Bay Area music venues, including Oakland’s The Fox, San Francisco’s The Independent, Berkeley’s Greek Theater, and Outside Lands. That is, if I’m being honest, mostly how he uses Instagram: he posts those pictures.
If you want a non-Insta archive of his pictures, you can find it here. There are a lot of cool photos there, as you would hope from someone who made his money, owns a part of his local baseball team, and can spend most of his time doing what he wants. It turns out that what he wants is taking cool-as-hell pictures of Neko Case and The Go-Go’s and Janelle Monae. I can respect it, if I’m being honest.