Jon Stryker

Jon Lloyd Stryker (born c. 1958) is an American architect, philanthropist, and billionaire heir to the Stryker Corporation medical technology company fortune.

As reported by Forbes, Stryker's net worth is estimated at $4.2 billion.

Stryker is the founder and president of Arcus Foundation, which primarily supports great ape conservation efforts and LGBT social justice, and has awarded over $500 million in grants.

The threatened colobine species Rhinopithecus strykeri is named after him.

Stryker was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

He is the youngest grandchild of Homer Hartman Stryker, founder of the medical supply company Stryker Corporation.

Jon's father, Lee Stryker, died in an airplane crash in 1976.

Stryker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from Kalamazoo College in 1982.

Stryker funded the purchase of a 190-acre abandoned grapefruit grove in 1997 and oversaw its transformation into a modern sanctuary, which today provides lifetime care for more than 250 chimpanzees rescued from biomedical research laboratories.

The land, formerly a game reserve and ranching area, was purchased in 2003 by U.K-based conservation organization Fauna and Flora International through a major donation by Stryker's Arcus Foundation.

He is also the co-founder and Board Chair of Save the Chimps, the world's largest chimpanzee sanctuary located in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Stryker was named one of the nation's Top 50 donors by the Chronicle of Philanthropy every year from 2006 to 2012 and again in 2014.

Speaking to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in 2008, Stryker explained that the Arcus Foundation's two primary areas of focus, while seemingly unrelated, are bound by the common themes of compassion and justice:

"Great apes are under huge threat. They are becoming extinct in the wild, and they are being used in the biomedical and entertainment industry then just being thrown away. We don't use the language of animal rights — it's more of a compassion and conservation language. That's one common ground — the compassion side. Another connection is justice. In our work for human rights, we are among those trying to expand traditional ideas of social justice to include sexuality and gender. In our great apes work, we often see a link between economic development for people and ape conservation — social justice for people can truly enable conservation."

He was awarded the Creating Change Award by the National LGBTQ Task Force in 2008.

He now serves on the college's Board of Trustees and was the recipient of the college's 2010 Distinguished Service Award.

He also received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Stryker is a registered architect in Michigan and is president of Depot Landmark LLC, a development company specializing in the rehabilitation of historic buildings.

Stryker is a founding board member of Greenleaf Trust, a privately owned bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

He received the Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan Award from Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center in 2012.

Stryker, who is openly gay, is one of the world's leading philanthropic donors to the LGBT community.

His Arcus Foundation is the top LGBT-specific grant-making organization in the United States, giving more than $17 million a year to organizations working toward social justice for LGBT people in 2013.

Stryker is a Platinum Council donor (giving US$50,000 or more in annual contributions) to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a national organization that works to support the candidacies of openly LGBT officials at all levels of government.

Through the Arcus Foundation, Stryker gave more than $10 million in 2013 to support great ape conservation efforts.

Stryker is a founding board member of the Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy, a 90,000-acre not-for-profit wildlife conservancy in central Kenya's Laikipia County.

He received the 2014 Global Vision Award from Immigration Equality, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to LGBT and HIV-positive asylum seekers, detainees, and binational couples.

He received the 2015 Visionary Award from the Gay Lesbian & Straight Education Network.

In 2015, Stryker spearheaded, together with Jurek Wajdowicz, the ongoing international series of LGBT-themed photography books published by The New Press.

In 2016, Jon Stryker and his sister Pat Stryker each gave $5 million to the Equal Justice Initiative to help fund a national memorial to victims of racial lynching in the United States.

The siblings made the donation in honor of their late father, Lee Stryker.

In 2017, Stryker joined the board of trustees of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

In 2017, Stryker donated $1.275 Million to expand Virgin Islands National Park with the purchase of an 11.8-acre property on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

In 2017, Stryker was named a Patron of Nature by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In 2023, Stryker joined the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation's Council for Hope.

Stryker served on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 2018 to 2021.

Stryker is the founder and president of the Arcus Foundation, a private international philanthropic organization primarily supporting great ape conservation efforts and LGBT causes, as well as other social justice endeavors.

He was named to Forbes' list of America's Top 50 Givers in 2018.

In October 2019, Styker donated $2 million to Spelman College for the first ever queer studies chair at an HBCU (Historically black colleges and universities).

Stryker is one of the leading funders of great ape conservation efforts around the world.

Stryker is a donor of the New York Community Trust, which announced in 2020 that it would donate $75 million to the city's social services and cultural non-profit organizations that were affected by the coronavirus pandemic.