Gregory Nickerson
April 28, 2015
Susan Gore is arguably Wyoming’s most influential libertarian promoter.
She puts millions of her personal wealth into political activities and nonprofit groups that speak loudly in the Legislature and on the campaign trail.
Since 2008, Gore has founded and financed three non-profit organizations that seek to reshape Wyoming politics and loosen restrictions on campaign spending nationwide. These include the Wyoming Liberty Group, Republic Free Choice, and the Pillar of Law Institute. Her staff had a role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed corporations, unions, and certain nonprofits to ramp up their political spending.
Even so, many who oppose her activities seem somewhat in the dark about just who she is, where she came from, and what her ultimate goals are. WyoFile’s review of published biographies, court cases, land records, and historical documents reveals some of the facets of her life.
Gore, a resident of Cheyenne, has lived in Wyoming for almost 20 years. Her Wyoming roots go back three generations in the southwest part of the state. She came to Wyoming in the mid-1990s after living for more than a decade in a transcendental meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa. Before that she lived in Delaware and Vermont.
More widely known is that Gore grew up in the family that founded the company most famous for inventing Gore-Tex fabric. Through the course of her life, the private family company grew from a small operation in a basement to a global chemical engineering behemoth that makes more than $3 billion in annual revenue and employs 10,000 people.
Gore’s own assets have fluctuated. She was wealthy by the 1980s due to inheriting shares of a family trust, but nearly bankrupt by the late 1990s after falling ill and ending her support of the meditation movement. She later viewed her involvement in the movement as a mistake, according her testimony before a Delaware court.
Her mother then gave her enough shares of family stock to make her wealthy again in the 2000s. In 2003 she adopted her ex-husband in an unsuccessful attempt to boost her children’s share of the family inheritance.
Through it all, Gore pursued her version of a better world. And in Wyoming, she seems to have found her niche as a promoter of conservative-libertarian ideas.
Two of her sons, Joel Otto and Nathan Otto, also play a role by serving on the boards of her groups.
Together, their efforts put pressure on Wyoming’s small-money elections, where nearly every legislative race costs less than $20,000.
Dan Neal, a long-time legislative observer who formerly directed the Equality State Policy Center, has followed Gore’s groups for years.
“I think they are getting more attention than they deserve,” Neal said. “This woman moves in from out of state and hires a bunch of people to come here and tell us what to do. It seems a little odd.”
“Everybody’s got a right to speak their mind,” he said, “but people need to recognize she’s got a lot of money, and she can make her voice a lot bigger and a lot louder than most people.”
Susan Gore’s rise in Wyoming is two intertwined stories: the work of three conservative-libertarian groups with national ambitions to promote anonymous political spending, and the journey of their founder, whose experience as an heiress to a successful family business informed the political changes she proposes.
WyoFile requested comment from Gore through her staff. She did not respond. [ ... ]
Susan Gore’s life
" ... Susan Gore was born in 1939. The family originally lived in Salt Lake City, but moved to Delaware in 1950. According to reporting by the Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, she attended Newark High School in Delaware where she met her future husband Jan C. Otto. They both attended Middlebury College. Otto later earned a graduate degree in physics from Dartmouth and an M.B.A. from Harvard. She and Otto divorced in 1981, and he later moved to Boulder, Colorado.
During the 1980s Susan Gore put part of her resources into supporting the transcendental meditation movement, advocating for prisons to use meditation as part of rehabilitating inmates. She gave to the effort in Vermont, a state where she had lived with Otto.
Gore and her sons later lived near the Fairfield, Iowa, headquarters of the transcendental meditation movement started by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one-time spiritual advisor to the Beatles. The community included a university and dozens of start-up businesses founded by followers of the Maharishi, including Gore and her sons.
Delaware Chancery Court documents cite Gore as testifying she became ill and was in “very, very bad shape” by the end of her time in the meditation movement. According to Susan Gore’s testimony as cited in a Delaware Supreme Court decision: “After leaving the [meditation] movement in 1995, Susan spent three years convalescing in a series of monasteries. By the end of the 1990s, Susan was facing the possibility of personal bankruptcy.”
Her financial troubles came after years of selling her shares of family stock and putting money into the meditation movement and her sons’ businesses, according to her siblings. At one point she invested $5 million into her son Joel Otto’s airplane business, according to the Wilmington News Journal reporting.
During Gore’s marriage to Otto, she sold a portion of her 3,900 shares in the Gore company to support herself and her family, according to court documents. She also put 1,340 of her shares into trusts to benefit her children and out of her own reach.
Susan Gore moved to Wyoming in about 1996. In an effort to resolve her financial situation Gore wrote a letter in 1999 to her mother asking for more Gore stock from the family’s Pokeberry Trust. Vieve Gore eventually released 336 shares of stock to support Susan, according to court documents. The shares together were potentially worth tens of millions of dollars."
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