title: @WhitneyTilson: Kudos to my old friend Steve Klinsky!
This billionaire is quietly giving away free college to 800,0...
author: @WhitneyTilson
contenttype: tweet
publication: Twitter/X
published: 2026-04-08T15:44:52+00:00
sourceurl: https://x.com/WhitneyTilson/status/2041905123547295990
word_count: 204
Kudos to my old friend Steve Klinsky!
This billionaire is quietly giving away free college to 800,000 people
fortune.com/2026/03/31/finan…
Excerpt:
Steve Klinsky has spent 25 years building New Mountain Capital into one of private equity’s most respected firms, with $60 billion in assets under management across hundreds of portfolio companies. His investment record speaks for itself: a supply chain software company he bought for $600 million sold for over $8 billion. A life sciences firm he backed went public at a $3 billion gain. The firm often says that it has never had a portfolio company go bankrupt.
But ask Klinsky what he’s most excited about right now, and he’ll tell you about a website.
ModernStates.org—the online home of his Modern States Education Alliance—has quietly reached 800,000 people and given away the equivalent of 25,000 free years of college credit, all without spending a dollar on advertising. And Klinsky says that’s just the start.
“It’s just getting started,” he said in a recent interview on Goldman Sachs’ Great Investors podcast, noting that it’s all happened without a single dollar spent on advertising.
“There’s $1.7 trillion dollars of student debt,” Klinsky said when speaking about what motivates him, a notable philanthropist. “It’s an unreal number.”