Rebekah Mercer

Rebekah Mercer is an American political donor. She is listed as a director of the Mercer Family Foundation on the foundation’s IRS returns, has been a director of the UK company Emerdata Limited since March 2018, and is named in Parler LLC’s January 2021 corporate disclosure statement as one of the two members of the holding company that owns part of Parler.

Mercer Family Foundation

The Mercer Family Foundation (EIN 20-1982204) is a 501(c)(3) private foundation that has been recognised as exempt since June 2005 and files IRS Form 990-PF. Rebekah Mercer is listed among its directors in every filing year in the IRS extract record, from the return filed in November 2014 through the most recent, with reported compensation of $0. Robert Mercer, Jennifer Mercer and Heather Mercer appear as directors in later years. For the fiscal year ending December 2024 the foundation reported revenue of$4,234,044, total expenses of $4,000,989, charitable disbursements of$3,784,824, and net assets of $88,315,177.

On several of her own FEC filings she reports her occupation as “Co-Founder” and her employer as the Mercer Family Foundation.

Federal Political Contributions

FEC Schedule A records for a New York, NY contributor named Rebekah Mercer, covering June 2016 to December 2023, include $449,400 to Trump Victory and$334,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2016, $5,400 to Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. in 2016, and$10,000 apiece to the federal accounts of ten state Republican party committees in 2016. Later records include $15,000 to FreedomWorks for America in 2018 and$50,000 to Protect Ohio Values PAC in 2021, alongside a long list of contributions to individual House and Senate campaigns. Contributions before June 2016 were not retrieved for this page, so no lifetime total is given here.

The Make America Number 1 super PAC (FEC committee C00575373) received $15.5 million across four contributions in the 2016 cycle from Robert Mercer of East Setauket, NY. The FEC record shows no contribution from Rebekah Mercer to that committee.

Emerdata Limited and Cambridge Analytica

Emerdata Limited, a private company incorporated in England on 11 August 2017 and registered under the standard industrial classification for data processing and hosting, is the corporate link between Rebekah Mercer and the Cambridge Analytica group. Companies House records her appointment as a director on 16 March 2018, the same day as Jennifer Lynne Mercer; she remains recorded as an active director and Emerdata is in administration. Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, had been appointed a director of Emerdata on 23 January 2018 and resigned on 28 March 2018, so the two overlapped on the board for about two weeks.

When Cambridge Analytica LLC filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition in the Southern District of New York on 17 May 2018, its Statement of Financial Affairs listed Emerdata Limited as a shareholder holding 89.5 per cent of the company.

Parler

Parler was founded in 2018 and entered a Customer Services Agreement with Amazon Web Services in June 2018. On 9 January 2021 AWS notified Parler that it would suspend all services as of 11:59 p.m. on 10 January; the suspension took effect overnight. Parler sued AWS in the Western District of Washington on 11 January 2021 and moved for a restraining order; Judge Barbara Rothstein denied the motion on 21 January 2021. In that litigation Parler did not assert a First Amendment claim against AWS, did not dispute that some of the posts at issue violated AWS’s Acceptable Use Policy, and acknowledged in its reply brief a “backlog of 26,000 instances of content that potentially encouraged violence.”

The corporate disclosure statement Parler filed with that suit on 11 January 2021 states that Parler LLC has no parent corporation and that its members are John Matze and NDM Ascendant LLC, a Delaware company; it further states that NDM Ascendant LLC’s members are “Rebekah Mercer and the Rebekah Mercer 2020 Irrevocable Trust.” No ownership percentages appear in that filing. When Parler refiled against Amazon in March 2021, the court granted its unopposed motion to keep the identifying information of Parler’s members redacted and under seal, so the January 2021 statement remains the public record of the company’s ownership.

What Is Not Established Here

This page was reduced substantially. The following were removed because no source that met this project’s standard could be found for them:

Her education — attendance at Cornell and Stanford, a stated field of study, and a 1999 Stanford master’s degree in management science and engineering — and the claim that she worked as a trader at Renaissance Technologies. Neither could be tied to a record.

The claim that she and her father were “major donors to the Make America Number 1 super PAC.” The FEC record contradicts the part about her: the committee’s Mercer contributions are all from Robert Mercer.

Her service on the Trump transition team’s executive committee. No transition or campaign document confirming this was retrieved.

The characterisation of her as a “managing director” of the Mercer Family Foundation. The foundation’s own returns list her as a director; her FEC filings say co-founder.

That the Mercer family provided “early and substantial funding” for Cambridge Analytica beginning in 2013, and that this was the family’s “early bet” on data analytics. What the primary record shows is narrower and later: a March 2018 directorship at Emerdata Limited, which by May 2018 held 89.5 per cent of Cambridge Analytica LLC. Nothing retrieved documents pre-2018 Mercer funding of the firm, and the FTC’s 2019 Cambridge Analytica actions do not mention her.

All claims about Breitbart News — that the Mercer family were major financial backers, that their funding expanded the site, and that this connected them to Steve Bannon. Breitbart News Network is privately held and no ownership or funding record was located. The Breitbart affiliation and connection were removed from the frontmatter for the same reason, as was the Steve Bannon connection.

Her ownership share of Parler. The public filing names her as a member of NDM Ascendant LLC but states no percentage, so the previous claims of “majority ownership,” a Matze minority stake, and a November 2020 public disclosure of her role are not carried forward. The March 2021 suit by John Matze against Parler and Mercer is also not described here: no docket for it was located, it is a state-court matter, and its allegations are contested claims rather than findings. The removal of Parler from Apple’s and Google’s app stores is likewise absent — the federal court order covers only the AWS suspension.

The “Digital Political Impact” list of general influence claims, the paragraph on unnamed “additional media ventures” and unnamed philanthropic grantees, and the assertion that she “served as a trustee of multiple organizations.” A followerCount field reading “Not a public-facing social media figure” was removed as an editorial judgement rather than a datum, along with primaryPlatforms, since no account of hers on Parler or elsewhere was verified.