Ron Baron has spent decades making big bets on companies others doubted. His latest wager is on New York City.
With a $75 million gift to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Baron will help build a 2,000-seat outdoor theater offering free performances. Construction started last month, just as Mayor Zohran Mamdani was facing backlash from the city’s billionaires over a planned pied-à-terre tax.
“Most people I talk to are not as positive about New York as I am,” Baron, 83, said in an interview from his Upper East Side apartment. “I saw tougher times, and New York has always recovered. We’ve had poor governance for periods of time, and it’s always recovered.”
The Lincoln Center donation from the Baron Family Foundation comes as his wealth is set to jump thanks to a well-timed investment in SpaceX beginning in 2017. His net worth currently sits at $8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing his fortune for the first time. A successful stock-market debut for Elon Musk’s rocket company Friday could see it jump by another $1 billion or more.
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Before he became one of Wall Street’s most visible Musk backers, Baron was known for a research-heavy, patient approach. Some of his best-known bets date back decades, including investments in Charles Schwab Corp., Choice Hotels International Inc. and Vail Resorts Inc. Baron founded his asset manager in 1982 after working as an analyst at several Wall Street brokerages. By 1992, its assets had grown to $100 million.
Big bets on Musk’s companies have boosted several Baron funds over the last decade as well as the founder’s personal fortune. Baron owns billions of dollars of SpaceX and Tesla Inc. shares personally, he has said, and he hopes to buy another $1 billion or so in the upcoming SpaceX IPO.
His Partners Fund had roughly 40% of its portfolio in the two companies as of May, which helped it post a 25% return in 2025. That was its third straight year of gains after a 42% loss in 2022 that was largely driven by a slump in Tesla shares. Other funds managed by Baron have been less successful in recent years, including the small-cap focused Generational Growth Fund, which fell 14% last year.
Baron is a vocal advocate for Musk’s companies among the retail investors his funds serve. Musk has spoken three times at the annual conferences he’s held at Lincoln Center since 2004. This year’s will feature SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell.
But he wasn’t always sold on the vision of the world’s richest man. When Musk first visited Baron at his office during the road show for Tesla’s 2010 IPO, Baron passed.
“I thought it was unlikely he’d be successful,” Baron said. “Car companies, 60 failed in my lifetime.”
Four years later, Baron spent about two hours with Musk at a Tesla factory in Fremont, California. “We had the most amazing conversation,” he said. “That night, I said, ‘I have to invest in this.’”
‘Their Family’
Now, as Baron’s fortune grows, he’s increasingly focused on how to deploy his wealth and the values that will guide him.
His decision to give big to Lincoln Center came after several conversations with Mariko Silver, the chief executive officer of the performing arts complex. Silver described how the theater is part of a $335 million plaza redesign, created with input including from the people who live in the neighboring public housing.
The project reckons with Lincoln Center’s history: In the 1950s, the working-class neighborhood of San Juan Hill was cleared in part to make way for its theaters. When the redesign is completed in 2028, a wall around the plaza’s perimeter will be removed and the stage will reorient users to take in a panorama of midtown skyscrapers — facing the city rather than with their backs to it.
Baron said he sees the gift as a way of giving back to the city that has been so good to his family. Both his grandfathers immigrated to New York from Eastern Europe more than 100 years ago: One worked as a foreman in a candle factory in Brooklyn, while the other was a pushcart shoe peddler on the Lower East Side before opening a candy store.
Baron grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where his mother collected funds to help families who survived the Holocaust get a start in their new lives. It is not lost on him that his family stayed alive, and thrived, by coming to New York.
Now , Baron is concerned about the rise of antisemtism in the US. He is working on a $15 million to $20 million effort to build a center for Jewish life at Bucknell University, his alma mater.
“My idea is that when parents bring their children to look at a college and they see a beautiful building and a beautiful place for Jewish life at the school, they say, ‘They must really care about Jews here. I think this would be okay for my son or my daughter to go here,’” Baron said.
The Baron Family Foundation is on track to reach $1 billion in assets within the next decade, Baron said, which would put it in the top 200 family foundations in the US, according to nonprofit researcher Candid. He doesn’t want to pass on his wealth directly to his heirs, he said. Rather, he’d like them to manage the foundation he has built up, while retaining a focus on the city he’s lived in for more than 50 years.
On a recent morning, Baron was woken up by the sound of three grandchildren running down the halls at his East Hampton home. He built the compound, he explains, leaning into a Jewish maxim: When you have sons, not daughters, it’s harder to keep them close — even in his family, where his two sons work for his firm. He pulled out all the stops, with a basketball court, a theater and more.
Baron foresees a future where his heirs are passing by the Baron Theater at Lincoln Theater.
“They wanted to name it the Judy and Ron Baron Theater and I said, ‘No, just Baron.’ I said that I didn’t want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to walk around and see a building named after some dead guy. I wanted them to feel that it was family that did this. Their family, not a person who’s gone.”