Barron’s backtracks on Getty Trust funding figure in Katherine Fleming profile

Barron’s has corrected a major error in its profile of Katherine Fleming, the president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, after misstating the scale of the institution’s planned capital improvement program by several orders of magnitude.

In its October 16 article, Getty Trust’s CEO Steers $9 Billion. How She Does It, the outlet initially reported that the Getty’s overhaul of its facilities would cost “between $600,000 and $800,000.” In reality, the program carries a projected cost of between $600 million and $800 million — a thousand-fold difference that dramatically alters the perception of both the project’s ambition and the institution’s financial reach.

The correction, issued the same day, brought the figure back in line with public information about the Getty’s scale. The trust, one of the world’s wealthiest cultural organisations, manages a $9.45 billion endowment that funds its museum, research institute, conservation centre and grant-making foundation. The initiative in question involves major mechanical upgrades, new energy facilities, and a redesign of decorative arts galleries and public spaces at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Though the mistake was numerical, its impact was reputational. By printing a figure that reduced a sweeping infrastructure project to the price of a minor renovation, the article inadvertently minimised the scale of the Getty’s operations and the leadership role Fleming occupies in global arts philanthropy. In a sector where fiscal scale signals institutional seriousness, such an understatement risked misleading readers about one of the world’s most significant cultural endowments.