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American billionaire Jeff Yass, co-founder of trading firm Susquehanna International Group, has given about $110 million to Republican candidates and political groups ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, making him one of the largest individual donors of the 2026 cycle.
The total, which includes money given with his wife, Janine, places Yass third among individual donors this cycle, behind Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and shipping-supplies magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who have given about $138 million to Republicans, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Almost all of the Yass money has gone to super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums as long as they do not coordinate with candidates.
Ohio governor's race gets the most
The largest single recipient is V-PAC: Victors Not Victims, a super PAC formed to back Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate who is the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. Yass has put $30 million into the group in four payments since March 2025, the latest a $10 million check in August. That is more than the $21.8 million that Ramaswamy's Democratic opponent, former Ohio health director Amy Acton, had reported raising for her whole campaign by late August.
Yass has also given about $18 million to the School Freedom Fund, an arm of the anti-tax Club for Growth that backs candidates who support private-school vouchers and other school-choice programs, and $16.5 million to Club for Growth Action, the group's main super PAC. School choice has been his main political cause for more than a decade. He gave $41.7 million to Students First, a Pennsylvania school-choice group, from 2010 to 2022.
In Tennessee, the School Freedom Fund passed $3 million to a PAC supporting U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn's campaign for governor this summer. Yass also gave $1 million directly to a Blackburn-aligned committee.
Money for Trump's super PAC and House Republicans
He gave $16 million to MAGA Inc., the super PAC that backs President Donald Trump, in the first months of 2025, and $2 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC working to keep the Republican majority in the House. Smaller checks went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican National Committee and individual candidates.
Not all of his money followed Trump's lead. Yass gave $12.5 million to Protect Freedom PAC, a group aligned with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. In late 2025 the PAC sent $1 million to a new super PAC backing Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican critic of the president. Massie lost his May primary to Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL endorsed by Trump.
Yass gave about $100 million to Republican causes in the 2024 election cycle, when he was also a major donor to Club for Growth.
A fortune built on trading and ByteDance
Yass, who grew up in Queens, New York, started Susquehanna in 1987 with a group of friends from Binghamton University. The Philadelphia-area firm grew into one of the world's largest options traders and market makers. His fortune is now worth about $77.8 billion, making him the richest person in Pennsylvania and one of the 30 wealthiest people in the world.
Much of that wealth comes from Susquehanna's early bet on ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok. The firm first invested in 2012 and owns about 15% of the company, with about 7% held by Yass personally.
That stake drew scrutiny in 2024, when Trump dropped his support for banning TikTok in the U.S. about a week after meeting Yass at a Club for Growth donor retreat in Florida. Trump said at the time that the two men discussed education, not TikTok. TikTok's U.S. business was moved into a new joint venture in January, led by Oracle Corp., Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, in which ByteDance kept a 19.9% stake and affiliates of its existing investors hold 30.1%.
Outside politics, Yass pledged $100 million to the University of Austin, a private college in Texas, in November 2025, the largest gift in the school's history.
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