Patagonia Now Belongs to Planet Earth

When you have more money than you ever need in your lifetime, what do you do? Well, instead of trying to buy / not-buy / be forced to buy Twitter, or go to space, Yvon Chouinard has taken his company Patagonia and given it away.

Valued at three billion dollars, the clothing company that has been a mainstay for decades will be transferred to a non-profit. Meera Navlakha at Mashable has more about how this was done.

The Chouinards donated 2 percent of their voting stock to the specially created Patagonia Purpose Trust, which the Times reports will be overseen by family members and their advisors. The remaining 98 percent of the company's common shares will go towards the newly founded Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit "dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature". 

Patagonia will continue to function as a private and for-profit organization. Funding for the Collective will come from Patagonia itself. 

Mashable

The goal of this move is to take all profits from Patagonia and use them for environmental and conservative efforts. Recent years have shown the beginnings of real-world effects of climate change. I applaud this move. I can only hope that more companies feel social pressure to do something similar in order to save this rock we all call home.