This story was produced by The Dallas Morning News and reprinted with permission.
WASHINGTON — A professional poker player turned TikTok billionaire is helping to bankroll Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s push to oust Republicans who stymied his school choice agenda.
Jeff Yass, the Pennsylvania options trader, has spent more than $209 million in the past decade promoting school choice and pro-voucher candidates.
That includes over $6 million to Abbott in recent months and even more to groups airing attacks in the March 5 primary against the “rural 16,” GOP lawmakers on Abbott’s naughty list for blocking his school choice measure.
Yass’ donations are made possible by a spectacularly successful bet on ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok — the video-sharing app used by hundreds of millions. Abbott banned it from state-owned cell phones a year ago, citing risks to privacy and security that echo concerns aired by governments around the world.
Yass’ stake exploded from $2 million in 2012 to an estimated $21 billion. That’s the bulk of a $30 billion fortune that ranks him as the 25th-wealthiest American on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Abbott’s targets in the state legislature see themselves as defenders of limited resources for public schools, not “woke” enemies of opportunity as ads, mailers and robocalls paint them. Some find it exasperating that so much of the onslaught is linked to TikTok.
Related: The school choice plan that is controversial, even in Texas
“It’s very concerning that a guy who made his money in a way that …is very harmful to our young people is using some of that money to double down on his harm to our young people by defunding the public schools,” said state Rep. Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, a former schools superintendent who has endured an ad barrage financed in part by Yass.
The Abbott campaign did not respond to repeated email and text requests to square the governor’s views on TikTok with his support from Yass.
“Owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members, TikTok harvests significant amounts of data from a user’s device, including details about a user’s internet activity,” Abbott said when he banned the app from state-owned devices.
Yass, through a spokesman, declined an interview request but provided a brief statement: “School spending has doubled in real terms over the last 30 years and results have gotten worse, particularly in urban districts. The time for choice and competition is now. I plan to support pro-school choice candidates in any state.”
Yass is a new player in Texas politics, though he has spent big money in Kentucky, New York, North Carolina and Florida. In his home state of Pennsylvania, he’s put $62 million into a group he co-founded called Students First PAC, which backs candidates in both parties that seek alternatives to public schools.
As Abbott has boasted, the $6 million Yass gave him Dec. 18 was the biggest single campaign donation in Texas history. That check, on top of $250,000 Yass gave two months earlier, is fueling Abbott’s quest to replace school choice opponents in the Texas House.
In November, 21 House Republicans broke with Abbott to strip education savings accounts from a $7.6 billion school finance bill. All but five are seeking reelection. Most represent rural districts where alternatives to public schools are rare.
The ESAs would let families use $10,500 a year per child in taxpayer funds for private school tuition.
Abbott has been barnstorming Texas, stumping against incumbents he’d like to replace. He has spent $4.6 million in the last month supporting challengers to 10 of them.
Apart from Abbott, two pro-voucher groups Yass is deeply involved with are also targeting the defectors.
AFC Victory Fund and a Texas offshoot, affiliated with the American Federation for Children, has gotten $4 million from Yass since last fall. He’s given $15 million to School Freedom Fund since 2021, federal records show, plus $62.3 million to its parent organization, the influential anti-tax group Club for Growth.
The rural 16 aren’t defenseless.
San Antonio billionaire Charles Butt, the H-E-B supermarket magnate and 55th on the Bloomberg list, is a longtime booster of public schools. He has put $2.8 million behind the embattled incumbents since July via the Charles Butt Public Education PAC.
VanDeaver has reported raising about $1 million since July, a quarter of it from the Charles Butt PAC.
Teachers groups have put far more modest sums into the races.
Like the targeted incumbents, teachers unions resent the heavy spending from Yass and other out of state billionaires, including Betsy DeVos, who served as education secretary in the Trump administration, and Richard Uihlein, a shipping magnate. That’s on top of big money rolling in from Texas billionaires. Oilman Tim Dunn has given $4.6 million to conservative PACs and pro-voucher candidates. West Texas fracking billionaire Farris Wilks has given $3.3 million.
Related: Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition
In September, AFC announced it would spend $10 million nationwide to defeat lawmakers who oppose school choice. Since then, Yass has given $3.5 million.
The School Freedom Fund will spend nearly $4 million on ads targeting 14 Texas Republicans who opposed the ESAs, officials said last week.
“Texas is the front line of the fight for school freedom,” David McIntosh, president of Club for Growth and the School Freedom Fund, said in a statement.
One of the group’s ads airing in East Texas links state Rep. Travis Clardy, a six-term Nacogdoches Republican, to “woke” curriculum and slams him for “[voting] with Democrats against Gov. Abbott’s education freedom bill giving parents the right to choose a better school, free of indoctrination.”
Abbott himself has spent over $400,000 backing Clardy’s opponent, Joanne Shofner.
Clardy mocked the governor as “the $6 million man” in thrall to “damn Yankee billionaires” who don’t care about districts like his.
“These billionaires sitting around in Pennsylvania and California and Michigan and D.C. — nobody thinks that those people are wringing their hands worrying about the poor rural East Texas kids and how are they ever going to get a quality education,” he said.
Another School Freedom Fund ad running in Sherman uses footage of a person in drag reading to small children, and a shot of an all-gender restroom sign. That ad accuses state Rep. Reggie Smith of “keeping kids in woke schools.”
Smith has hit back by depicting vouchers as “a magnet for illegal immigrants,” on grounds that courts require states to provide equal opportunity to children regardless of legal status.
“School choice sounds nice. So does ‘federation for children.’ Don’t be fooled,” the narrator intones in one Smith ad. “They want Reggie Smith gone because he stopped their voucher scheme…. He’ll never allow voucher handouts to illegal immigrants.”
The targeted lawmakers are deeply conservative on gun rights, abortion, immigration, border security and taxes.
“It’s just crazy that I would be accused of being weak on Second Amendment [rights] or weak on the border,” VanDeaver said, “because everything that I have supported, Gov. Abbott supported — other than vouchers.”
State Rep. Hugh Shine, R-Temple, finds it frustrating that Abbott has aligned himself with a TikTok mogul whose role is too hard to explain in the rush to election day. Abbott has put over $400,000 into that district in the last month.
“The outside money is obviously a concern,” Shine said between stops in his Central Texas district. “If people knew that and understood that, they would probably not want to support someone who was getting money for their campaign from that source.”
Shine got $60,000 from the Charles Butt PAC. Rep. Steve Allison, under siege in suburban San Antonio, got $360,000 — against nearly $700,000 his pro-voucher opponent Marc LaHood has gotten from the governor in the last month.
The PAC’s executive director didn’t respond to emails.
Related: OPINION: After decades studying vouchers, I’m opposed to them
Yass,- 65, moved to Las Vegas after college to play poker for a living.
He was an up-and-coming trader in his 20s when he figured out how to beat the odds at the horse track, turning stacks of cash into huge jackpots by betting on every combination of winners — until the tracks caught on and turned him away.
In 1987, Yass and some college friends co-founded Susquehanna International Group. It grew into a giant that uses quantitative models to execute rapid-fire trades.
“If you have bought stock or options on an app like Robinhood or E-Trade, there’s a good chance you traded with Susquehanna without knowing it,” the investigative news site ProPublica wrote in 2022, in an examination of Yass’ taxes.
Thanks to a well-timed bet that markets would sour, Susquehanna was one of the few firms that made money in the Black Monday crash on Oct. 19, 1987, that nearly brought down the economy.
The big score came when Susquehanna invested $5 million in 2012 in ByteDance, the Chinese company that later developed TikTok. The Wall Street Journal values Yass’ share at $21 billion.
That’s the bulk of a fortune big enough to rank him the 51st wealthiest person in the world.
A co-founder of Susquehanna now sits on the ByteDance board, a concession the company made as its U.S. presence grew and suspicion with it.
Critics say the TikTok app promotes hate speech and misinformation while giving China a dangerous way to track Americans and subtly influence them. In late 2022 Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, called China’s capacity to conduct “information campaigns” and collect foreign data via TikTok “extraordinary.”
TikTok disputes such allegations, insisting U.S. users’ data is off limits to the company’s Chinese owners.
India has banned the app. Texas and more than 30 other states have banned it from government devices, as have a number of western countries.
The University of Texas and Texas A&M block TikTok from their wifi networks.
Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. Is it what parents want in the long-term?
A self-described Libertarian, Yass backed the Libertarian presidential nominee in 2016. He also backed Andrew Yang for New York mayor after Yang fell short in the 2020 Democratic presidential race; Yang promoted government-funded debit cards that families could use to pay for private education.
Yass has said little publicly to explain his ardor for school choice.
In rare public comments, he has bashed public school teachers as overpaid and accused their unions, which are a core Democratic constituency, of keeping children in failing schools to protect jobs. In Philadelphia’s mayoral race, he spent $1.1 million to help torpedo the teachers’ union choice in the Democratic primary.
An adviser pointed to comments from 2022, when Yass explained his support for “educational freedom” to a Wall Street Journal columnist:
New York City spends $35,000 per child per school year. Over 12 years, that’s $1.2 million for three kids. If a mom could choose how to spend that, Yass argued, she’d probably put them in charter or religious schools, with funds to spare.
“She’s not poor anymore. She’d get a much better education for her kids,” Yass said. “But that self-serving teachers union comes in and grabs that $1.2 million out of her hands.”
Monty Exter, government relations director at the Texas Association of Professional Educators, said he’s less concerned about Yass’ link to TikTok than “his desire to dismantle public education.”
As for the big money being unleashed on voucher opponents, he said, “It certainly is making the races more difficult.”
This story was produced by The Dallas Morning News and reprinted with permission.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.