The heir to the Mellon fortune has donated more money to U.S. political campaigns than any other individual this year. But there’s alarmingly little information about what one of America’s most politically influential men is really like.
Elon Musk’s backing of Donald Trump in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election has dominated the headlines this week. But Musk isn’t Trump’s biggest mega-donor — that honor goes to Timothy Mellon, 82, whose approach to exercising political influence is the exact opposite: If Musk is the loudest, Mellon is, by all accounts, the quietest.
At Whale Hunting, we love stories about the obsessions of the extremely rich. All of his life, the heir to the Mellon banking fortune has taken great effort to keep himself away from the public eye — so much so that the only clear photos of him on the internet are in black and white. Sometimes, though, his strange hobbies bring his personality out in technicolor.
In the summer of 2012, a man was kayaking along the Rhode Island coast looking for the Narrangansett Runestone, a semi-submerged rock that had long been a cornerstone of local lore. Supposedly inscribed with Viking-era runes, the kayaker found that this cause célèbre of local tourism — supposedly centuries older than the United States itself — had gone missing. He was confused: a four-ton rock the size of a small car doesn’t just move on its own.
