Sanford Diller

Sanford Diller, who died in 2018, was the son of Austrian immigrants and a conservative Republican. He donated to several far-right-wing organizations, including $100,000 in 2016 to Judicial Watch, which is still putting out articles about Hillary Clinton’s “private email server” and “transgender illegal aliens” getting hormone treatments paid for by U.S. taxpayers. In 2016, the Helen Diller Foundation had also donated $100,000 to Canary Mission, a secretive group that publishes dossiers on anti-Israel campus activists—including undergraduates. Those dossiers, containing photos and details about the profiled individuals’ activist and personal lives, appear intended to intimidate and frighten the subjects. Some are students and faculty of Arab/Palestinian descent, and a few are American Jews. The Helen Diller Family Foundation also gave $150,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Foundation and $175,000 to the anti-leftist, anti-Democrat David Horowitz Freedom Center. Sanford Diller's Prometheus Real Estate Group is one of the largest apartment owners on the West Coast, with 18,000 units across California, Portland, OR and Seattle. Founded in 1965, the company also owns retail and office properties. Its apartment values have risen as a result of the housing boom in the San Francisco Bay Area. The low-key Diller owns two-thirds of the company through a trust. Prometheus manages the properties owned by investors including Northwestern Mutual Life and billionaire John A. Sobrato's Sobrato Development. Diller's wife Helen, a prominent California philanthropist, died in January 2015. In 2003 they donated $35 million to the University of California San Francisco. Their daughter, Jackie Safier, is president and runs the company's operations.