Bob Parsons is 75 years old, worth an estimated 4,1 billion dollars, and for most of that fortune's history he carried a war inside him that none of it could touch. In March 1969 he deployed to Vietnam's Quang Nam province as a rifleman with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, and spent 13 months there, including combat on Hill 190 that left him wounded by shrapnel and decorated with the Purple Heart, the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry and the Marines' Semper Fidelis Award. What it also left him with was post traumatic stress disorder that lasted for decades after the medals were put away.
The business success came first and came fast by comparison. Parsons founded Parsons Technology, a personal finance and tax software company, and sold it to Intuit in 1994 for 64 million dollars, worth roughly 165 million today. He used the proceeds to start GoDaddy in 1997, built it into a household name partly through Super Bowl ads that traded on shock value, and sold a 71 percent stake in 2011 for 2,3 billion dollars, close to 3,4 billion in today's money. None of it, by his own account, did much for the war still running in the background.
What changed that was a week in Hawaii in 2018. After reading Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind, Parsons underwent multi day psychedelic therapy with a qualified therapist, working through ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms over consecutive sessions. He has described it since as the thing that finally worked after decades of carrying the war around, a claim striking enough coming from a Vietnam veteran in his seventies that it reframed how he spends a meaningful share of his philanthropy.
Parsons has since become one of the more significant private funders of psychedelic research aimed specifically at trauma. He gave 5 million dollars to establish the Parsons Research Center for Psychedelic Healing at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine, and another 2 million dollars to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the nonprofit that has spent decades pushing psychedelic assisted therapy toward mainstream medical acceptance. He has been deliberate about staying out of psychedelic companies themselves, keeping the funding on the research side rather than anywhere it could look like he stood to profit from the treatments he is promoting.
The rest of Parsons' holdings, run through YAM Worldwide, read like a list assembled by someone with money and no single fixed interest, eight companies spanning the Scottsdale National golf course, where he has spent more than 300 million dollars on renovations, commercial real estate, video production, metal processing, the world's largest Harley Davidson dealership, the golf equipment brand PXG, and a hedge fund. But the psychedelic research funding is the one he now talks about as personal rather than commercial, a bet that what took decades to work on him might work faster for veterans who do not have fifty years to spare.