Paul Marshall

Spear’s Review

In 2024, Paul Marshall topped the Sunday Times Giving List with charitable donations totalling £145.1 million over 12 months.

Even more impressive was the fact that the committed Christian took the top spot not on the size of his donations alone, but also the fact they equalled more than 16 per cent of his entire fortune.

It wasn’t the first time Marshall has been celebrated for his philanthropy. In 2016 he was knighted for that very reason. Though these days the financier (Marshall co-founded hedge fund Marshall Wace) is best known as something different: a media mogul. First, he ploughed £50 million into GB News, the right-wing broadcaster that is courting those dissatisfied with the BBC. 

Then he set his sights on even bigger prizes: the Daily Telegraph and Spectator. The titles went up for sale in 2023 when creditors seized them from their previous owners. In September 2024 it was announced that Marshall would buy the Spectator for £100 million; he would go on to install Michael Gove as its editor. Meanwhile, the Telegraph seems to have eluded him.

As well as big deals and charitable donations, Marshall has had his fair share of controversy in recent years. In 2024 it emerged that he had liked tweets from far-right and conspiracy accounts. In 2025, he called for the BBC to be sold or broken up, describing it as ‘an embodiment of anti-competitive market distortion’ and the ‘propaganda arm of the state’.  

This prompted former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to point out that the BBC’s trust ratings were significantly higher than those of Marshall’s GB News; +23, according to YouGov, versus -15 for GB News.

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