Soros’s non-profit leases new office space

[Published Sept 2011 and updated July 2023] George Soros’s non-profit organization, Open Society Foundations, has leased thousands of feet of office space in New York, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The outfit is expanding by moving into the Argonaut Building at 57^th Street and Broadway.

Open Society Foundations has taken over the entire building, which contains 152,00 square feet of office space. According to the WSJ, the foundation has signed a 30-year lease on the building.

Previously Open Society Foundations was based in a mostly residential building on 59^th Street, where its headquarters leased only 75,000 square feet of office space.

“This will be ideal because it will be a hallmark headquarters,” Stewart Paperin, an Executive Vice President at the foundation told the WSJ.

WSJ reported that there has been a trend of nonprofits expanding recently.

“Everyone knows that the financial-service sector has driven the New York real estate market for the last couple of decades. Now we’re seeing not-for-profit foundations, universities, schools and social-media companies coming into play,” Brian Given, of Colliers International, which was involved in arranging the lease, told the paper.

The Argonaut Building, which is 102 years old has previously been occupied by General Motors and by the newspaper giant Hearst Corp.

Created by Soros in 1992, the Open Society Foundation’s initial aim was to help Eastern European countries in the transition from communism. This remit has now been expanded to other areas of the world which are trying to transition to democracy.

Soros himself is a Hungarian-American financier and businessman who was born in Budapest but now resides in the US.

In 1992 Soros became known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ when he made USD 1 billion during the Black Wednesday currency crisis.

Editor’s notes: As of July 2023, Open Society Foundations remains headquartered at The Argonaut Building at 224 West 57th Street.

As of 2021, OSF has reported expenditures in excess of $16 billion since its establishment in 1993, mostly in grants towards non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

In 2017, George Soros transferred $18 billion to the grant-making network and, in 2020, Soros announced that he would create the Open Society University Network (OSUN), and endowed the network with $1 billion.

In 2023, George Soros handed over the leadership of the OSF to his son Alexander Soros who set about restructuring the foundation.