Do we like them?

Do we like Charles Koch?

Our score: 4 out of 10. Real money for criminal justice reform and a public change of tone, set against decades of funding the climate and culture-war machine.

Charles Koch runs Koch Industries, the huge privately held company out of Wichita, Kansas. He is a billionaire who has spent decades bankrolling a web of political groups, with his late brother David, that pushed lower taxes and less regulation. Few Americans have shaped politics with their cheque book as much as he has.

On the planet, the record is not flattering. Fortune reported that through Americans for Prosperity, the network got more than 400 members of Congress to sign a pledge against climate legislation without matching tax cuts. CleanTechnica reported in 2025 that the group was still running local campaigns to roll back vehicle emissions standards.

On culture-war money, critics point to the network's funding. Salon reported in 2013 that the Koch network gave millions to Concerned Women for America's lobbying arm, a group that lobbied for Texas abortion restrictions. That is a critic's account of network spending, not Koch's own words, and I found no direct statements from him on trans or gay rights.

In November 2020 he surprised people. In his book Believe in People, he wrote “Boy, did we screw up!” about the partisanship his side had fuelled, and congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Critics were sceptical, and the same report showed his company's PAC and employees still gave $2.8 million to Republicans against $221,000 to Democrats that cycle.

Some of his change did show up in actions. In December 2014 he said he would fund criminal justice reform. Koch-backed groups also took on immigration policy, and Bloomberg ran a 2015 piece on the Kochs' immigration problem with their own side. Critics doubt his motives, but the work has been real.

Nothing new has turned up on him lately, and none of the pages I could open carried recent news. Court cases in the company's past belong to the firm, and I could not open a source to tell them fairly here, so I have left them out. That is a gap in this file, not a clean bill of health.