Lynda and Stewart Resnick | Meet the Real Wizards of Oz

Stewart & Lynda Resnick: A California Power Portrait

Background

Stewart Resnick, born in 1936, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey. His entrepreneurial journey began with a janitorial business he started while earning his law degree at UCLA. Lynda Resnick, born in Baltimore, started her career in advertising at just 19. The couple met in Los Angeles in the 1960s and have been partners in both life and business ever since. Together they built The Wonderful Company, whose portfolio includes Wonderful Pistachios, POM pomegranate juice, Halo tangerines, and Fiji Water. Their combined net worth is estimated at over $11 billion, making them the wealthiest farmers in the United States. Brigada News Philippines + 2

1. Education

The Resnicks' educational philanthropy is enormous in scale but carries a dual character — elite university patronage alongside a paternalistic community model in the Central Valley.

They pledged $750 million to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2019 to further global environmental sustainability research, $50 million to UC Davis for the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Center for Agricultural Innovation and Research Fund, and $50 million to the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel. In February 2026, they donated $100 million to UCLA Health to fund the expansion of the neuropsychiatric hospital and mental health campus. The Aspen InstituteWonderful

The Resnicks founded and continue to support Wonderful College Prep Academy, two public charter schools in Lost Hills and Delano, California. Critics have noted that these schools, branded with their company name, exist in the same communities where their farmworkers live — communities whose drinking water has been compromised. While residents of Lost Hills are forced to buy expensive bottled water or suffer the consequences of drinking contaminated water, the Resnicks, with their control over the Kern Water Bank, have stored enough water to fill San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy reservoir twice. The optics of providing schools while controlling the water those same communities depend on has led critics to describe their philanthropy as a company-town model. WikipediaEarth Island Journal

2. Agriculture

In the 1980s, the Resnicks began investing in pistachios, almonds, fruits, and wine. To plant and irrigate these crops, they acquired 130,000 acres of farmland and a 20,000-acre water reserve in California's San Joaquin Valley. The Wonderful Company now operates 175,000 acres of farmland and uses around 150 billion gallons of water annually. International Business TimesInternational Business Times

Since taking over the Kern Water Bank, Paramount (their farming subsidiary) more than doubled its production of almonds and pistachios, becoming the largest grower and processor of the nuts in the world. Earth Island Journal

The environmental cost is severe. Despite agriculture representing less than 2% of California's GDP, the Resnicks and similar agricultural interests consume 80% of the state's water, converting public water resources into private profit through products like pistachios and pomegranate juice. In 2015, it was revealed that the Resnicks and other farmers had been watering their orchards with treated fracking wastewater, under a California water recycling program that allows oil companies to sell wastewater to landowners. USA HeraldWikipedia

In 2019, farmworkers at Wonderful Company struck for better wages. Most of the striking workers were immigrants from the Mixteca region of Guerrero and Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The Resnicks have made investments in Lost Hills — new health centers, pre-K facilities, housing projects, gardens, sidewalks, lights, a community center and a soccer field — but these are widely seen as a calculated effort to manage the narrative around labor and environmental conditions rather than addressing structural power imbalances. SocialistWorker.orgWikipedia

3. Hollywood

The Resnicks occupy the cultural stratosphere of Los Angeles, leveraging art and entertainment patronage to build social legitimacy alongside their agricultural empire.

As members of Hollywood's A-list, the Resnicks have the requisite second home in Aspen, Colorado, and are well-connected in Hollywood. Lynda Resnick's father produced horror films, including the cult classic The Blob (co-starring a then-unknown Steve McQueen). Their pomegranate juice, POM Wonderful, is a staple at the major annual Oscar parties and consumed by a number of Hollywood notables. Beesource

Lynda joined LACMA's Board of Trustees in 1992 and serves as Vice Chair on the Executive Committee and Chair of the Acquisitions Committee. The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion at LACMA, funded by a $45 million donation and designed by famed architect Renzo Piano, opened in 2010. The 45,000-square-foot naturally lit space hosted inaugural exhibitions from their own private collection alongside works rarely seen outside Mexico. They also made a $30 million gift to the Hammer Museum to build a new cultural center, and total LACMA donations have reached $70 million. LACMA + 2

This deep entrenchment in LA's cultural institutions — alongside their connections to film industry executives, celebrities, and philanthropic circles — gives the Resnicks a social shield that makes sustained public criticism far more complicated than it would be for a purely industrial billionaire.

4. Water Rights

This is arguably the defining chapter of the Resnick story in California, and also the most contested.

The Kern Water Bank was started in 1988 and jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money. It was envisioned by California's Department of Water Resources as a safeguard against prolonged drought — a repository for excess water to be pumped out in dry years. Substack

In 1994, state water officials, water infrastructure contractors, and agricultural landowners with water rights arranged a secretive meeting at a resort in Monterey Bay, California. These groups rewrote California's water laws without any input from voters, taxpayers, or legislators. The new laws, called the Monterey Plus Agreement (or Monterey Amendments), eliminated a long-standing "urban preference" rule that had given urban areas priority access to state water during droughts. Perfect Union

What once belonged to the state was transferred to a few private water contractors. One of which was Westside Mutual, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wonderful Foods. The Wonderful employee who runs Westside, Bill Phillimore, is the chairman of the "public" organization that manages the Kern Water Bank. One secret meeting and the Resnicks owned nearly 60% of an important California water resource built with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. Perfect Union

The Kern Water Bank is a 32-square-mile water recharge basin. It stores underground up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water. 57% of the bank is controlled by Stewart and Lynda Resnick. In 2021, their stake was estimated to be worth over $1 billion. Wikipedia

During droughts, the Resnicks could sell Kern water back to state water systems — water originally built and paid for by California taxpayers. Their agricultural operations consume approximately 150 billion gallons of water annually, even as urban water systems in California face severe shortages, receiving only 5% of their requested allocations in 2023. Perfect UnionThe Canary

A 2017 National Geographic documentary, Water & Power: A California Heist, explored the Resnicks' influence and the Kern County Water Bank deals, juxtaposing lush Resnick orchards with local residents whose taps had run dry. News Deeply

It's important to note some nuance: experts have stated that claims the Resnicks' water bank directly contributed to the 2025 LA wildfire firefighting shortages are not accurate, as the Kern Water Bank is roughly 150 miles from Los Angeles and separated by the San Gabriel Mountains, making water transfer logistically impractical. aol

5. Political Influence and the Newsom Connection

The Resnicks, nicknamed "the Koch Brothers of California" by activists, have contributed many millions of dollars to candidates from both sides of the political aisle and to proposition campaigns, all while continuing to sell back public water to the public at a huge profit while promoting legislation and other efforts to weaken laws protecting fish, wildlife, and water. CounterPunch

Their relationship with Gavin Newsom is well documented. Stewart and Lynda Resnick have donated a total of $366,800 to Governor Gavin Newsom since 2018. This includes $250,000 to the campaign to fight the Governor's recall — $125,000 each on the same day. In an email from Gavin Newsom urging opposition to the recall effort, the Resnicks' names appeared at the bottom under "PAID FOR BY STOP THE REPUBLICAN RECALL OF GOVERNOR NEWSOM." CounterPunch

The Resnicks are major promoters of the Delta Tunnel project — Newsom's controversial infrastructure plan to reroute water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which critics argue would primarily benefit large agricultural water users like the Resnicks while devastating the Delta ecosystem and small farming communities. Sacramento News & Review

During the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the couple hosted a cocktail party at their Beverly Hills mansion honoring Senator Dianne Feinstein and featuring then-Governor Gray Davis and former President Jimmy Carter. Their political giving spans decades and both parties, though it has been heavily Democratic in recent cycles. Influence Watch

The structural concern raised by environmental and labor advocates is not that any single donation is illegal, but that the pattern — large contributions to politicians who then make water policy decisions benefiting the Resnicks — constitutes a system where private water rights purchased through backroom deals are then protected by politically cultivated relationships. Critics note that domestic water use in California rose 19%, while the state repeatedly failed to rein in Big Ag's consumption — even as Newsom's top donors included the Resnicks, whose company uses 150 billion gallons annually. Sacramento News & Review

Summary

The Resnick story is one of California's most consequential and contested. They have genuinely given billions to education, the arts, and sustainability research. But those philanthropic gestures coexist with — and in some cases appear designed to offset scrutiny of — an agricultural empire built on the privatization of publicly funded water infrastructure, enabled by closed-door political deals, and sustained by decades of campaign contributions to the politicians who regulate water policy. Whether one views them as visionary philanthropist-entrepreneurs or as the architects of a legalized extraction system depends largely on whether you live in Beverly Hills or Lost Hills.