[gumby]

> I am not sure about the legality

non-profits can own for-profit businesses. They generally invest their endowments in...the stock market, and owning a whole company is just that at a larger scale.

A well known example is Usenix taking its networking sideline and turned it into the company UUnet which let Rick Adams become a billionaire (for a while). I actually considered this scandalous and still do, but it was all legally above board. It ended up ensnarled in the Worldcom fraud, which felt like poetic justice to me.