[bensonn]

Is 100 billion really that much? The church has 16 million members. That is about $6,000 per member. The church has had 200 years of tithing and compound interest to get to this point. If used as an endowment to support 16 million people in 170+ countries that doesn't seem too crazy.

A single human (not mentioning any names) having 100 billion seems crazy.

[jacurtis]

This isn't that the church has $100 billion dollars. They actually are estimated to be worth more than Apple in real estate and cash.

This $100B is one single fund that is a "secret" fund. It was collected by the church members donating to charity, but asking the church to allocate the funds. So this is in addition to all the other offerings a member is required to make (10% of pre-tax gross income). So the church took money promising to allocate it to charity, and the church members thought they were donating to charity, but the church instead siphoned it off and kept it for themselves in a secret fund that they denied existed. It took a whistleblower from within the fund's organization to reveal it to the public.

So this is in addition to normal money that the church has, or its real estates, or its hundreds of billions in other investments. This is actually a tiny slice of the pie, but it was collected maliciously and wasn't reported to the IRS.

[pc2g4d]

"kept it for themselves"---it still belongs to the church.

I thought everybody assumed, since the church so frequently taught its members about prudent financial management, that the church itself was doing the same thing.

I've left the church, I have many criticisms of it, but I really don't have a problem with an organization taking the long view and accumulating a large enough reserve to survive on the interest. It's the same approach universities and other large nonprofits use. And it's not like it's particularly neglecting its present-day mission either. Probably is too stingy, though (e.g. using volunteers to clean buildings.)

[henrikschroder]

> A single human (not mentioning any names) having 100 billion seems crazy.

Technically, legally, the current president of the Mormon church, Russel Nelson, has those 100 billion dollars, and everything else the church owns, because of its corporate structure.

[wl]

Those assets, technically and legally, belong to the office Nelson occupies, not Nelson personally. It's a corporation sole, which is often used by Bishops of other churches to hold the assets of a diocese. The alternative would be the corporation aggregate with a board of directors.

[tomrod]

16 million members claimed, closer to 20%-30% attend, maybe 20% of that figure pay substantial amounts (excluding children, impoverished, most families are single-income homes due to Mormon doctrine, etc.)

[darksaints]

$100 billion in one fund. $32 billion accounted for in other funds [0]. Not to mention 2% of the land in Florida, several billion dollars in commercial and residential real estate. Who knows what else they're hiding.

And 16 million members is fools' accounting. It doesn't account for the millions of people like me who don't go to church and yet are still members because I don't want to pay money to hire a lawyer to force the church to take my name off the records.

[0] https://kutv.com/news/local/mormonleaks-says-new-documents-l...