The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust Limited — a company with one of the strangest mission statements in media: own Guardian Media Group forever, protect the paper's editorial independence, and plow the profits back into journalism. No shareholders collecting dividends, no billionaire with a yacht and a grudge. John Russell Scott set the trust up in 1936 precisely so no one could ever buy the paper out from under its editors; in 2008 it was restructured into a limited company, though everyone still calls it the Trust. * That's the clean version, and it's mostly true. Now the fine print. The Guardian's fundraising banners love the phrase "no billionaire owner," and fact-checkers like AllSides have pointed out the sleight of hand: there may be no billionaire, but there is a billion. The Scott Trust endowment was recently valued around £1.24 billion — an investment fund that cushions the paper's losses. "Reader-supported" and "sitting on ten figures" are both true at once. We think you should know both halves. * The money model is genuinely unusual: no paywall anywhere, voluntary reader contributions, plus the endowment's returns. That buys real independence — no proprietor phoning the newsroom — but it also means the paper's survival depends on keeping its contributing readers emotionally invested. That's a bias vector too, just a more democratic one. * Recent housekeeping worth knowing: in 2025 the Trust sold The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday paper, to the startup Tortoise Media — over loud objections from the papers' own journalists — and took a stake in Tortoise as part of the deal. So the Trust no longer runs the Observer, but partly owns the company that does. File under: even trusts do M&A. * Is The Guardian left-wing? Yes — openly, historically, unapologetically. It sits liberal-left and doesn't pretend otherwise, which by our scoring is the healthiest kind of bias: the declared kind. You know where the paper stands, you know no oligarch owns it, and you know a nine-figure endowment keeps the lights on. Read it with exactly that label on the tin.