My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another.
Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return.
Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop.
Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
Nonprofits still have to "make a profit" on the services they provide if they want to be a going concern. Unless you've got some big project to dump it into, it goes into an endowment for "a rainy day". Which then starts looking for places to park that money.
Some of the biggest nonprofits also have the biggest endowments and/or asset holdings - colleges/universities, hospital systems, religious leadership, etc etc.
Fundamentally, most non-profits are still run like a for-profit corporation and provide services in exchange for money, they just don't have publicly traded shares, dividends, etc. Think Harvard or hospital systems, not ACLU or Red Cross.
"Our organization does good work with the money we have."
"We could do more good work, or better work, with more money."
"Therefore investments/endowments we receive should be invested inwards, to increase the amount of money we have available with which to do good work."
You can see, of course, how this kind of cycle could become more about the money than the good work.
"This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission. "
Other than managing .org no one can say what ISOC’s so-called mission is nor point to any evidence of them doing it. The salaries they pay themselves however are substantial.
My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another.
Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return.
Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop.
Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.