La Jolla philanthropist T. Denny Sanford, who donated more than $1 billion to San Diego County institutions to do everything from study cancer to enrich childhood education and care for zoo animals, died Saturday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.
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Sanford, who divided his time between La Jolla and Sioux Falls, had been in declining health for many years, friends said.
His death came while Sanford was still active in philanthropy, the focal point of the later years of his life. The self-made banking entrepreneur told the Union-Tribune in 2018 that he hoped to “die broke.”
News of his death caused widespread sadness throughout San Diego County and expressions of gratitude for his generosity.
“Denny Sanford personified the very values of compassion and empathy that he so passionately championed,” said Pradeep Khosla, the chancellor of UC San Diego, which received more than $355 million in gifts from him.
“I have lost a dear friend, and San Diego has lost a true changemaker.”
Khosla was referring, in part, to Sanford’s decision in 2019 to give UCSD $100 million to study compassion and empathy. Before making the gift, Sanford sent David Brenner, who was vice chancellor of health sciences at the time, to discuss the idea with the Dalai Lama.
“He was inspired by the Dalai Lama’s work and wanted him to approve his idea,” Brenner said. “The Dalai Lama asked me if you can measure compassion and empathy. I said I think you can. He said, ‘You can’t study it unless you measure it.”
Brenner is now president of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research institute in La Jolla, which received $70 million from Sanford in 2024 to recruit new faculty. Another local institution, National University, received $350 million in 2019 to help the school become one of the dominant institutions catering to working adults.
Thomas Denny Sanford was born on Dec. 23, 1935, in St. Paul, Minn. His father, William, sold garments. His mother, Edith, died of breast cancer when Sanford was 4 year old.
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The country was still in the Great Depression when he was a child. But he rose above in what many describe as a genuine rags-to-riches story.
He earned a degree in psychology at the University of Minnesota, then went into sales, which enabled him to earn enough money to buy a bank in South Dakota. He changed the bank’s name to First Premier and specialized in serving customers who had poor credit.
Sanford — who was widely known as Sandy — accumulated a fortune that later led to him becoming a major figure in philanthropy. He would often tell people you have to “aspire to inspire before you expire.”
Much of his largesse benefited institutions in South Dakota, notably the Sanford Health System, which received about $2 billion in donations.
He also loved San Diego, where he spent a lot of time at his oceanfront home in La Jolla Shores. He had a particular affection for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, giving it a $30 million gift in 2018 to help underwrite the $87 million Denny Sanford Wildlife Explorers Basecamp, which was built on the site of the San Diego Zoo’s former Children’s Zoo.
Sanford stirred a lot of publicity, not all of it good.
In 2019, law enforcement officials in South Dakota started to investigate whether Sanford had come into possession of child pornography. Three years later, the South Dakota attorney general’s decided that it would not be filing any charges because because it didn’t discover any “prosecutable offenses” within the state’s jurisdiction, according to a court document filed.
Sanford is survived by his brother Charles Sanford; sons Scott and Bill Sanford; and three grandchildren.
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