Henrik Fisker quietly wound down his nonprofit after his EV startup went bankrupt

Henrik Fisker, the founder of failed EV startup Fisker Inc., and his wife Geeta quietly wound down a private charitable foundation established in late 2021 that was supposed to “incubate innovation in healthcare, education, sustainability, mobility, and all causes that help support the planet and improve and further the lives of people and animals.”

A tax filing submitted to the Internal Revenue Service in December 2024 — six months after Fisker Inc. went bankrupt — was marked as the foundation’s “final return.” The filing was made public earlier this year.

The Geeta & Henrik Fisker Foundation, as it was known, ultimately only made around $100,000 in grants across its three-year existence. Henrik Fisker did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The brief existence of the Fiskers’ foundation is another example of how the boom of electric vehicle startups in the 2020s — many of which went public via special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) mergers — helped fuel a rush of wide-eyed optimism.

When Rivian went public via a traditional IPO in 2021, it announced its own foundation, flush with 1% of the EV company’s equity. While that stake was worth around $643 million at one point, it eventually shrank to under $100 million. But the Rivian Foundation is still kicking. The nonprofit gave out its first $10 million in grants last year, and its website shows that the foundation has made another $2.2 million in donations to date across 2025.

The Fiskers created their foundation in late 2021, IRS filings show, roughly one year after the company went public by merging with a SPAC. They transferred 229,000 shares of company stock to the nonprofit in December of that year, which were collectively worth around $4 million at the time of the donation. The couple also appear to have contributed around $5,000 in cash that first year. (Geeta Gupta Fisker was Fisker Inc.’s chief financial and chief operating officer.)

The company did not announce the establishment of the husband-and-wife team’s foundation until February 14, 2022. While the press release touted the $4 million figure, by that point Fisker’s stock price had fallen enough that the value of the nonprofit’s stake in the company had already sunk to around $2.7 million.

The foundation did not make any grants that first fiscal year, filings show. When the fiscal year ended on September 30, 2022, the value of the shares had fallen to around $1.7 million.

Fisker’s stock price continued to slip as the company put its electric SUV into production in late 2022, began deliveries in mid-2023, and struggled to sell the flawed EV — all of which apparently limited the foundation’s scope.

In the foundation’s 2022 fiscal year (which ended on September 30, 2023), it made just one grant worth $92,287 to a JP Morgan “Charitable Gift Fund,” according to a filing. The Fiskers only contributed $9,500 in cash to the foundation that year, too, meaning the shares — the total value of which sunk again to around $1.4 million — were nearly all it had in terms of assets.

The most recent filing, which closes out the nonprofit, shows just one grant in the foundation’s final year: The Fiskers contributed another $1,988 to the same JP Morgan fund.

The Geeta & Henrik Fisker Foundation was not the couple’s only source of charity, although details about their other giving are hard to come by.

The 2022 press release notes that the Fiskers “supported various causes, including those engaged in education and healthcare projects” since founding the EV startup in 2016.

The release also states that the Fiskers donated around $1.9 million worth of company stock in December 2021 to what’s known as a donor-advised fund (DAF). That donation came from the Fiskers’ personal trust, though, an SEC filing shows — not from the Geeta & Henrik Fisker Foundation. And neither the press release nor the SEC filing say which DAF received the shares.

DAFs are a somewhat controversial tool for philanthropic giving. While people who donate to DAFs can still dictate where those funds ultimately go, that information does not have to be revealed to the public. In the meantime, donating stock to a DAF can allow the person making the contribution to deduct the value of that stock from their taxes — even if the stock value sinks.

DAFs can also hang onto that money for an indiscriminate amount of time. It’s therefore impossible to know whether the DAF that received the $1.9 million in Fisker shares made any grants before or after the value of those shares sank.