Richard Uihlein was born into the old Milwaukee beer dynasty: his father Edgar Uihlein was a descendant of the Schlitz brewing family and a prominent conservative activist in the 1960s and 1970s. Edgar sat on the John Birch Society’s finance committee, backed segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace and supported General Edwin Walker’s armed resistance to desegregation at the University of Mississippi, giving Richard an ideological script as well as seed capital.

Richard took the elite education route, graduating from Phillips Andover and then from Stanford University with a degree in history. Before founding Uline he worked in international sales at General Binding Corporation, a business co‑founded by his father, learning how to move office products around the world long before he turned his attention to cardboard boxes and stretch wrap.

Elizabeth Anne Hallberg grew up in affluent Winnetka, Illinois, daughter of an auto‑industry executive and a politically mixed household — she has said her mother was liberal and her father conservative. In her early years she describes herself as having held more liberal views, a contrast to the role she would later play as a culture‑war columnist and GOP funder.

As co‑founder and president of Uline, Liz is the one whose voice customers literally receive in the mail. She writes a regular column in the company’s thick product catalog and on its website, using a corporate marketing channel to complain about Chinese competition, marijuana, low interest rates, and eventually COVID‑19 restrictions she called overhyped. Where Richard shuns the spotlight, Liz folds the family’s politics into the packaging business’s brand.

In 1980, using start‑up capital from Richard’s father, the couple founded Uline as a mail‑order business selling shipping cartons and industrial packaging supplies. Over the next four decades they scaled it into one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, with sprawling warehouses, slick catalogs and an obsessive focus on next‑day delivery to factories, warehouses and e‑commerce sellers.

A Forbes estimate in 2014 put Uline’s value somewhere between 700 million and 2 billion dollars; by 2020 the company employed around 7,000 people across North America. Inside the firm, Liz serves as president and Richard as CEO, while the couple’s children sit in senior roles — turning the company into both a profit engine and a control center for a multigenerational political project.

Richard has been donating to Republicans for decades, but after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision he dramatically scaled up his giving, becoming one of the most important megadonors in the party. In the 2014 cycle the couple put at least 5 million dollars into politics; by 2016 that figure had jumped to around 22 million, routed through super PACs backing Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and ultimately Donald Trump, including half a million dollars for Trump’s inauguration.

In 2018 Richard spent nearly 38 million dollars on outside‑spending groups, making him one of the top four individual donors in the country. By 2020 the Uihleins had sent about 1.5 million dollars to the pro‑Trump America First Action super PAC and some 20 million more to other Republican vehicles. In the 2024 cycle, he poured close to 59 million into Restoration PAC, a leading pro‑Trump outfit active in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.

The couple’s money is not limited to candidates; it also builds an information ecosystem. From 2016 to 2018, a PAC they funded steered at least 646,000 dollars into a network of pay‑for‑play local‑style newspapers and websites created by conservative media entrepreneur Brian Timpone, churning out partisan content dressed up as hometown news. Later, Uihlein‑backed super PACs would flood Illinois with free “community” papers attacking Democratic governor J. B. Pritzker.

Uihlein cash also flowed into groups central to the events around January 6, 2021. Between 2015 and 2020, they gave over 4 million dollars to Tea Party Patriots, which helped organise the “March to Save America” rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. After the riot, revelations about the funding prompted institutions like Northwestern University to review (but ultimately keep) their contracts with Uline, illustrating how deeply the cardboard fortune had seeped into mainstream civic infrastructure.

At the state level, Richard is a major funder of the Foundation for Government Accountability, a think tank pushing to loosen child‑labor laws in dozens of states. In Wisconsin he has spent heavily on recall elections, union‑busting legislation and ballot campaigns against legalising cannabis. In Illinois he first bankrolled Bruce Rauner’s gubernatorial run, then turned on him over abortion coverage and put millions behind challenger Jeanne Ives.

Locally, the couple treat their multiple homes as forward operating bases. In Lake Forest and Lake Bluff, Richard funded school‑board slates opposed to diversity initiatives and critical of the district’s first Black principal. In suburban Palatine he backed groups trying to roll back policies that let trans students use facilities matching their gender. Through the American Principles Project, they poured millions into school‑board races nationwide with messaging against “transgender ideology” and critical race theory.

The Uihleins run two main philanthropic vehicles. Elizabeth’s LUMW Foundation funnels several million dollars a year into projects in Chicago’s northern suburbs and around Manitowish Waters, from bike trails and parks to local organisations that anchor her influence in those communities. Her giving amounts bounce between roughly 3 and 5.6 million dollars a year in recent tax filings.

Richard’s Ed Uihlein Family Foundation plays on a larger ideological field. Between 2013 and 2016 alone it granted around 40 million dollars to conservative think tanks and training pipelines such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Institute for Humane Studies, Media Research Center, Leadership Institute and the Philanthropy Roundtable, as well as to the American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity and the Institute for Free Speech. It also funds RealClearPolitics, The Federalist and youth‑oriented operations like Turning Point USA, knitting policy shops, media outlets and activist training into one megadonor‑driven ecosystem.

Away from packaging and politics, Richard chairs the board of Galectin Therapeutics, a biotech firm developing treatments for chronic liver disease and cancer in which he is the largest individual shareholder. It is a classic billionaire diversification move: using industrial cashflow to buy a speculative stake in high‑margin future medicine.

The couple’s personal footprint runs from a primary estate in Lake Forest to large homes in Lake Bluff, multiple lake houses in Wisconsin and properties in Florida. Their presence often triggers local disputes — from attempts to have a floating bog nailed to a lakebed in Hayward to requests for exemptions from leaf‑blower bans on their 22‑acre Illinois property — that show how billionaire expectations collide with the rules that apply to everyone else.