Americans spent the last two years watching egg prices hit $9 a carton while politicians blamed bird flu.
There were forces working behind the scenes to drive up the price of breakfast.
And a Facebook co-founder was behind one scheme that left Americans paying through the nose to put food on the table.
Dustin Moskovitz Bankrolled the Groups Behind Soaring Egg Prices and Pork Costs
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, pocketed billions, and then spent a decade using that fortune to strangle the farms that feed America.
His philanthropic operation – a nonprofit formerly called Open Philanthropy, now rebranded as Coefficient Giving – has funneled more than $480 million into animal rights groups since 2016.
Half a billion dollars – not to soup kitchens, not to veterans, but to the activists who raided a 114-year-old California egg farm with buses full of trespassers, pried open barn doors, and tried to steal chickens.
The California Post connected the dots this week: the same network of Moskovitz-funded groups that made animal farming legally and financially costy sits on an $89 million stake in Impossible Foods.
The conflict of interest couldn't be more direct.
Proposition 12 Egg Prices and the Billionaire Who Funded the Campaign
The money flows through two closely linked operations.
Coefficient Giving hands out grants to nearly every major animal rights organization in America. The Humane League received $94.5 million. Mercy For Animals took $38.7 million. The Good Food Institute, which promotes plant-based food alternatives, collected $32.5 million.
Then there's Good Ventures, the private foundation run by Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna – the vehicle holding the Impossible Foods stake.
Will Coggin, research director at the Center for the Environment and Welfare, connected the financial dots: "If Moskovitz-funded groups can come in and raise the price of eggs and pork or other animal protein at the supermarket, then all of a sudden Impossible Foods products become more cost-competitive, and that helps the bottom line for the investment."
Moskovitz has been open about his environmental motivations, framing the push against animal agriculture as a climate cause. But the ideology and the investment point in exactly the same direction – and Moskovitz profits either way.
Coefficient Giving also steered $4 million directly to the "Yes on Prop 12" campaign in California. Proposition 12 – passed in 2018, fully implemented in 2024 – mandated cage-free housing standards not just for California farms but for every out-of-state producer who wants to sell into the California market.
California’s extreme farming regulations drive up prices nationwide.
According to a Purdue University analysis, Prop 12 caused egg prices in California to increase by as much as $0.73 per dozen, producing a state-level consumer surplus loss of $223 million annually.
The Trump administration saw enough. In July 2025, the Department of Justice filed suit against California over Prop 12, with Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate calling out "bureaucratic red tape and unnecessary regulations" that made "the cost of everyday goods, like eggs, less affordable for Americans."
Moskovitz Funds the Journalists Covering Moskovitz
The scheme doesn't stop at ballot measures and activist groups.
Coefficient Giving – under its old Open Philanthropy name – paid The Guardian's nonprofit arm more than $2.2 million to fund a multi-year series on factory farming and animal cruelty.
Those Guardian articles quoted officials from organizations like Compassion in World Farming and the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation. Both had received millions from Coefficient Giving. Neither funding relationship was disclosed.
Hannah Thompson-Weeman, president of the Animal Agriculture Alliance, has spent years tracking this network.
"These groups are all connected, it's the same people, it's the same money flowing back and forth," Thompson-Weeman told The California Post. "Those different public personas are a very intentional strategy to work differently towards the same goal."
Coggin described the long-term plan: "They want to ban and get rid of standard animal farming. And in the long run, they want to replace it with things like Impossible Foods products or lab-grown meat."
American Egg Farmers Left Holding the Bill After California Mandate
Mike Weber runs Sunrise Farms in Sonoma County – his family's 114-year-old poultry operation.
In 2018, the same year Prop 12 passed with Moskovitz's backing, activists raided his farm.
"They showed up with buses, hundreds of people," Weber told The California Post. "They coordinated this whole event to storm onto our farm illegally, pry open the doors and run through the chicken houses, trying to steal the chickens."
Forty were arrested for trespassing. The activists claimed the barn was a horror show. Weber's own footage told a different story in court.
Prop 12 forced him to overhaul his entire farm design anyway – expenses that landed squarely on the shoulders of his customers.
"The small guys like us, at some point we have to tap out," Weber said, "because we just can't afford to keep borrowing money to swim like crazy to stand still."
Moskovitz, meanwhile, told a podcast he feels better after eating meat.
He just prefers that Americans can't afford it.
Sources:
- Josh Koehn, "Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz bankrolled $480 million activist crusade that's made your bacon and eggs pricier," New York Post, July 11, 2026.
- "DOJ Lawsuit Targets California's Proposition 12, Cites Rising Egg Prices," National Hog Farmer, July 2025.
- "Sales of Cage-Free Eggs: The Impact of Proposition 12 on Egg Prices and Consumer Welfare in California," Purdue University, 2023.
- "Proposition 12: A Coordinated Attack on American Animal Agriculture," AGProfessionals, July 2025.
- "Federal Government Sues California to End Proposition 12 for Lower Egg Prices," Food Safety News, July 2025.
