One of the Republican Party’s biggest donors — a tech and financial industry oligarch who’s been called Pennsylvania’s version of Elon Musk — is the top beneficiary of a state tax loophole that allows the wealthy to write off billions in donations to private and religious schools, even as the Keystone State’s public school system has faltered.

As that tax loophole has been broadened over the past few years, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter — Jeffrey Yass — has doled out tens of millions to elect state legislators who were involved in these policy decisions.

The findings come from a new report by the public policy institute Action Center on Race and the Economy, the corporate watchdog group LittleSis, and the All Eyes on Yass Campaign provided exclusively to the Lever, detailing how over the course of nearly twenty years, the Pennsylvania legislature has funneled more than $2.5 billion into private and religious schools by allowing wealthy people and businesses to donate to these schools’ tuition scholarships and then write off 90 percent of those expenses as tax credits.

Such tax credits have been criticized by experts as a way to sidestep the state’s constitution, which prohibits tax dollars going directly to private and religious schools. Pennsylvania’s public school funding was so meager that in 2023, the state’s highest court ruled the amount was unconstitutional.

“Our public schools — which have strong financial and educational oversight and educate all of our students without discrimination — are in need of significant investments to bring our school funding system into constitutional compliance,” wrote the public policy research firm Keystone Research Center in a 2024 report.

According to the report, from 2017 to 2023, these private-education tax incentives — the Educational Improvement Tax Credit and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit — delivered $30 million in tax credits to businesses tied to Yass and two of his colleagues, making the firms the largest recipients of the tax credits over the six-year period.

Yass and his colleagues did not respond to a request for comment sent to the Susquehanna International Group, a quantitative trading firm the trio cofounded.

Yass, Pennsylvania’s richest man and school voucher proponent, is a prolific campaign spender, doling out more than $35 million in state-based elections just in 2024. His spending has corresponded with a dramatic increase in the amount of money the legislature set aside for the tax credits, the report found, growing from $210 million in 2018 to $630 million in 2025.

These increases are “100 percent policy decisions,” said Aly Shaw, one of the report’s authors.

But Yass’s ambitions extend far beyond just Pennsylvania. In 2024, he was the sixth-largest campaign donor in the entire country, donating more than $100 million to Republican candidates. He’s spent tens of millions to defeat candidates who oppose school vouchers, which allow public education funds to be used for private schools. And he’s now involved in a political action committee (PAC) tied to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that’s working to elect anti–public school candidates nationwide.

Along with including a lucrative school voucher provision in his One Big Beautiful Bill, President Trump has made other moves that have benefited Yass, among his most prolific campaign donors.

That includes the White House’s treatment of TikTok, the Chinese social media platform in which Yass was an early investor. Last year, rather than shut down TikTok’s US operations due to national security concerns, as Congress ordered in 2024, the White House negotiated the sale of US TikTok to Trump allies — allowing Yass’s firm to retain its ownership share of the business.