John Arrillaga

John Arrillaga (April 3, 1937 – January 24, 2022) was an American billionaire real estate developer and philanthropist who was one of the largest landowners in Silicon Valley. one of five children in a lower-middle-class home with his mother, Freida, and father, Gabriel, who traced his roots to the Basque region. His mother was a former nurse who worked in a laundry to support the family, while his father worked at a produce market. He attended Morningside High School in Inglewood, and graduated in 1955. He played on the university's basketball team and earned first-team all-conference and third-team All American honors for the 1959–60 season.

After he graduated from Stanford with a bachelor's degree in geography, The Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center is named in memory of his first wife. The Stanford Department of Athletics is housed in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center. Many other athletic facilities carry his surname, in addition to some that helped to renovate or rebuild. Altogether he built, or made the major donation to, 200 Stanford projects. He also endowed 57 full scholarships, 38 of them athletic scholarships; notable recipients included Tiger Woods, Katie Ledecky, and Christian McCaffrey. He personally supervised the major renovation of Stanford Stadium in 20052006 with an insistence that it be completed in nine months, so as not to cause any disruption to the football season. and followed it with a $151 million donation in 2013, the largest individual donation from a living donor in the university's history. The university awarded him the 'Degree of Uncommon Man' in 2009 for his contributions to the university. She died on October 13, 1995, in their Palo Alto home of lung cancer at age 54. Their son John Arrillaga Jr. is married to Justine Stamen Arrillaga, founder of the TEAK Fellowship. After the death of his first wife, Arrillaga married Gioia Fasi, a former lawyer from Honolulu, Hawaii.