Those New Pickleball Courts? Thank Ozempic.

livemint.com:

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum just got $20 million to build a high-tech classroom for visiting students. The source: weight-loss drug wealth. Two nonprofit foundations are large shareholders of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the companies selling the drugs Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro popularly used to reduce weight.

Thanks to the drugs’ skyrocketing sales, the foundations’ stakes have surged in value, creating windfalls that are reshaping charitable giving. The philanthropies are now among the biggest in the world, with the Novo Nordisk Foundation counting $114 billion in assets and Lilly Endowment quadrupling in value to $40 billion. The Lilly Endowment is the second largest U.S.

foundation, behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and its $53 billion in assets—but ahead of the Ford Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust, according to FoundationMark data provider. With their newfound anti-obesity riches, the foundations have been expanding their ranks and increasing their donations by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

That means plenty more money for the Lilly Endowment’s cherished Indiana causes, such as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, which this year received $20 million to build a science and technology classroom for visiting students. “We can achieve a lot more now," said Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which is upping donations for scientific endeavors, such as $130 million earmarked in September to build a cell-therapy plant in Denmark. “Size actually does matter." The enrichment of the foundations is a product of the unusual ownership structures of the two drugmakers.