“I’ll crack it around 6:30,” Pritzker said.
The governor is set to give a big speech tonight at the convention, speaking on the same night as a guy who worked his way up through Chicago politics and seized the presidency, Barack Obama. Back in January, Chicago Magazine foresaw a scenario eerily similar to what’s to come, and made a hell of a prediction, speculating that Pritzker would use the spotlight as a stepping stone to the nation’s highest office.
“He’ll get to make a prime time speech,” reporter Edward Robert McClelland wrote, “which he hopes will make him The Next President of the United States, just as Barack Obama’s speech in Boston did 20 years ago.”
The magazine also said the Pritzker family would end up with another building or street sign with their name on it after the campaign was done and dusted, and just for good measure reminded readers that the Pritzkers are “the first family of Illinois.”
As J.B. mentioned on Monday, his ancestors did indeed immigrate to Chicago from Ukraine. Nicholas J. Pritzker arrived in 1881, worked as a pharmacist, and his three sons—Jack, Harry, and A.N. Pritzker—become lawyers and started the firm Pritzker & Pritzker, which was successful enough to fund the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. The global Pritzker empire began in earnest in 1957 when A.N.’s son Jay Pritzker and his brother Donald spent $2.2 million to buy Hyatt House, a Los Angeles motel that had recently opened near LAX, sensing that high-end travelers would need a lux place to crash near the airport. They quickly built Hyatt into one of the world’s biggest hotel brands, and along the way acquired companies like Ticketmaster (sold to Paul Allen in 1993) and the Marmon Group, a manufacturing conglomerate they sold to Berkshire Hathaway, first partially and then entirely.
Through a series of deals and savvy investments, the family has managed to keep the fortune, and then some—since the pandemic it’s added over $10 billion. Forbes estimates that the entire family’s net worth is $41.6 billion, split among the roughly 50 members.
And the family has put its time and money into establishing a nexus of soft power at essentially every Chicago cultural institution, as well as at institutions around the country.
Penny Pritzker served as commerce secretary in Obama’s Cabinet and, more recently, got tapped by President Biden to lead a peace envoy in Ukraine. But before that, she chaired the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art near Chicago’s Gold Coast for years. Pritzker currently serves on the board of the Obama Foundation, which is spearheading the opening of the museum at the presidential library on Chicago’s South Side.
And through it all she’s been a dedicated collector, a frequent attendee of the Expo Chicago art fair and a supporter of local artists, such as Theaster Gates. He and her husband, Bryan Traubert, have made appearances on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list year in and year out.
Her brother, the governor, doesn’t do much board hobnobbing these days, though he remains a trustee of Duke University. In the 2024 state budget Pritzker earmarked an additional $10 million to the Illinois Arts Council in order to fund art-related organizations across the state. He’s also, like his sister, a fan of Gates—he’s made official visits to the artist’s Rebuild Foundation, and has hung his art in the governor’s mansion.
Tom Pritzker, who’s been the public face of the family’s enterprise for decades, has also thrown himself into arts philanthropy, serving as chairman of the board of the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds one of the country’s great collections of Impressionist gems—plus Norman Rockwell’s Nighthawks. He’s also on the board of the University of Chicago, home to the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society, one of the oldest contemporary art concerns in the country. Elsewhere in the city there’s the Museum of Science and Industry—which is technically called the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, named for a guy with political views diametrically opposite to the Pritzkers’—and both Matthew Pritzker and Jason Pritzker have served on the board at some point. Gigi Pritzker Pucker is on the board of the Chicago Children’s Museum, and Jennifer Pritzker is the founder of the Pritzker Military Museum, which was established in Chicago in 2003 and earlier this year moved a few hours north to Kenosha.
But the Pritzkers’ reach extends far beyond the banks of Lake Michigan—they also hold serious positions of power at museums on both coasts. Before their divorce in 2019, John Pritzker and his wife, Lisa Stone Pritzker, were a powerful couple on the San Francisco art scene, serving on the board of SFMoMA, which is home to the Pritzker Center of photography. When Leo Villareal covered the Golden Gate Bridge with his Bay Lights installation—said to be the world’s largest LED light structure, and costing $8 million—the Pritzkers were at the launch, alongside future veep contender Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco.
And in Los Angeles, Jeanne and Anthony Pritzker, called Tony, have long been solid supporters of the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Tony has been on the board since 2011, and in 2013 the couple donated $2 million to the institution to support children’s programming. At the center of the innovative indoor-outdoor museum is an open-air courtyard now named the Pritzker Family Commons.
New York City is home to more billionaires than any city in the world—the Democratic donor Michael Bloomberg and the Republican donor Julia Koch among them. But the Pritzkers have found a foothold in the Big Apple too: In 2019, John joined the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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