Timothy Mellon

Timothy Mellon (born July 22, 1942) is an American businessman, grandson of Andrew Mellon and an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.^[1] Mellon is a major donor to the Republican Party and right-wing causes.

Mellon is the son of Paul Mellon and his first wife, Mary Conover Brown, and the grandson of U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.^[2]

According to Mellon's memoir, he grew up in a Virginia mansion, and a private plane shuttled him to boarding school in Massachusetts.

Mellon graduated from Yale University with a degree in city planning.^[3] A 1970 New York Times article described him as "a quiet Yale graduate with two college degrees who has applied computer techniques to city planning."^[4]

Mellon was the chief financier in the 1977 formation of Guilford Transportation Industries (GTI),^[5] a holding company named for his native Guilford, Connecticut. In 1981, GTI purchased the Maine Central Railroad from U.S. Filter Corporation, adding the Boston & Maine and Delaware & Hudson railroads in 1983 and 1984, respectively.

In 1998, GTI purchased the brand of bankrupt Pan American World Airways,

The "Pan Am Clipper Connection", operated by subsidiary Boston-Maine Airways, ceased operations in 2008 after the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) concluded that Boston-Maine's Air Carrier Certificate should be revoked on the basis of lack of financial fitness, poor management oversight, failure to follow federal laws and regulations, and filing false financial data with the department in its application for authority to fly large aircraft.^[6]

GTI, renamed Pan Am Railways in 2006, was ultimately sold to the CSX Corporation; the sale closed in June 2022,^[7] with the private owners being paid $600 million;^[8] Mellon owned the majority of the company.

In 1999, Mellon purchased the Goodspeed Airport in East Haddam, Connecticut, for $2.33 million. In 2020, he sold it to New England Airport Associates, LLC for $891,000.

Mellon gave $227 million to federal candidates and political committees from January 2020 through June 2024 , nearly all to Republicans.^[8]

In 2010, Mellon donated $1.5 million to Arizona's defense fund to help cover the costs of legal challenges against Arizona SB 1070,^[9] the broadest and strictest anti-illegal immigration measure in the U.S. at the time of its passage.^[10][1] It received national and international attention and spurred considerable controversy.^[11][12]

In the 2018 election cycle, Mellon was a major political donor, especially to the Republican-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund.^[13] In April 2020, he donated $10 million to Donald Trump's super PAC America First Action.^[1] According to OpenSecrets, in 2020 and 2022, he was the 6th- and 5th-most prolific donor in the U.S., spending $60 million and $47 million, respectively, to support Republican candidates and causes.^[14]

In August 2021, Mellon donated $53.1 million in stock to the State of Texas to pay for construction of walls along the US–Mexico border.^[15]

In the second quarter of 2023, Mellon donated $5 million to American Values 2024, a super PAC affiliated with presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; that, together with a large donation from billionaire Gavin de Becker, accounted for 97% of donations received by the PAC through the end of June 2023.^[16] By March 2024, Mellon's donations to the PAC totaled $20 million.^[17] By July 2024 the reported total had increased to $25 million.^[8]

Between April 2023 and March 2024, Mellon donated $15 million to MAGA Inc., a Trump super PAC.^[17] On May 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, Mellon gave MAGA Inc. $50 million, one of the largest disclosed donations ever.^[18][19] By July 2024 the reported total had increased to $75 million.^[8]

Mellon's self-published autobiography describes his political views.^[20][21] He calls social safety net programs "Slavery Redux", adding:

For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cellphones, WIC [the U.S. Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children] payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.

Mellon wrote that, as of 1984,

Something had obviously gone dreadfully wrong with the Great Society and the Liberal onslaught. Poor people had become no less poor. Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the "Establishment" to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations.... Drugs rose to the level of epidemic. Single parent families became more and more prevalent. The likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pandered endlessly to fan the flames.^[20][19]

In 2012, Mellon donated over $1 million to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) as part of its efforts to find Amelia Earhart's plane and remains. In 2013, he sued TIGHAR for racketeering, alleging that the nonprofit organization engaged in deceit in soliciting his money to search for Earhart's plane.^[22] Mellon claimed that the plane had already been found in 2010 before the donation was made.^[23]

U.S. District Judge Scott W. Skavdahl granted TIGHAR's motion for summary judgment in 2014, after recognizing that even Mellon's own experts were unable to confirm his allegations about the 2010 photographs that he claimed showed the plane. Skavdahl concluded:

Defendants represented to Plaintiff they were planning another expedition in their continued quest to find the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. Upon reading about Defendants' efforts, Plaintiff contacted Defendants and expressed his interest in supporting the expedition with a monetary contribution. That's exactly what the parties then did. No false representations were made. Regardless, no rational trier of fact could find Defendants falsely represented they had not found Earhart's plane by embarking on another expedition in hopes of finding conclusive evidence to prove it. No matter how convinced or sincere Plaintiff is in his subjective belief and opinion that Amelia Earhart's airplane was or should have been discovered prior to the making of his donation, that belief and opinion is insufficient to create a genuine dispute of material fact.^[24]

Mellon appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which affirmed the district court's ruling, without holding oral argument. The Tenth Circuit concluded that the lack of actionable falsity precluded Mellon's claims.^[25]

In 2002, Mellon stepped down as a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation after 21 years on its board.^[26]

Mellon moved from Connecticut to Wyoming in 2005.^[1]

In July 2024, The New York Times reported that Mellon was responsible for the 2012 removal and subsequent 2013 return of the Narragansett Runestone.^[27]

Mellon has been involved in a number of legal issues, often over relatively small dollar amounts. Testifying in a 2014 civil case, he estimated he had been deposed fifteen to twenty times, and that he did not know how many lawsuits he was currently involved in.^[8]