Who Owns The Guardian? No Billionaire — But There Is a £1.2 Billion Fund Behind It

By the Between the News desk · researched with AI tools, checked and edited by a human editor

The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust Limited, whose only job is to own The Guardian forever and protect its independenceCreated in 1936 by John Russell Scott; restructured as a limited company in 2008 (still called 'the Trust')The Scott Trust endowment was valued around £1.24 billion — profits fund journalism, not shareholdersIt sold The Observer to Tortoise Media in 2025 — and took a stake in Tortoise as part of the dealSources: Scott Trust/GMG annual reports, Tortoise Media, AllSides

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👁Decoded

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.

“No billionaire owner — but there is a billion.”