The father and son duo of Charles and Chase Koch is modeling how inherited wealth can be adapted as an industrialist fortune moves from one generation to another. Charles Koch’s personal giving has now passed the $2 billion lifetime marker, and he quietly helped transfer almost $6 billion in nonvoting shares of his suite of companies to a libertarian web of nonprofits and social-change organizations. That network is now transitioning to Chase Koch as the helm of a durable philanthropic machine. 

“It's never a pleasant thought, but it's not something that we shy away from. I think this principle-based approach enables us to hopefully be successful for multiple generations,” Chase Koch tells TIME. “To hit the elephant in the room, my father's 90. Hopefully we have another 30 years with him 'cause he's in great shape and very healthy. But he would say, ‘Look, if I'm gone tomorrow, I feel great about this.’”

Their marquee effort, Stand Together, has cobbled together an unlikely coalition of business titans, celebrities, and community activists to tackle everything from criminal justice reform and education inequality to lowercase-L liberalism and uppercase-C capitalism. Meanwhile, Chase Koch’s Key Change initiative and his Believe in People organization are scaling up and have already churned out more than $400 million in projects.

“My father's been involved in social change for almost 60 years of his life,” Chase Koch says. “So it's based on a lot of learning over a very long period of time. One thing that's very different about our approach and why we think so long term is that we don't really think about it as philanthropy. We think about it more through the lens of social change.”

And that approach demands results, not just warm feelings: “Milton Friedman said the greatest mistake is to judge programs and projects based on intent, not results. And so our approach in social change has always been about real results that help people and move the needle,” says Chase Koch. 

The pair, ages 90 and 48, are also out this month with a new book, Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader, that serves as something of an advice manual from the third-richest family in the U.S. The real lesson from these sons of Wichita, however, is how to build an apparatus that relies less on one charismatic leader than a consistent ideology that rallies like-minded super-rich donors to a vision. While their political heft is impossible to ignore, it really makes up just a small fraction of the fortune they are unleashing in pursuit of a nation that aligns with their values. “If you look at our overall efforts in politics, it's less than 10% of what we do across it all. Over 90% of that is community-based solutions,” Chase Koch says. “But I will say that policy, great policy, is critical to remove barriers for most people…That's gonna be part of our efforts going forward. That won't go away, but we'll make decisions based on that, of where can we make a difference to help remove bad regulation that holds people back and there'll be a very clear and high bar where we get involved and where we don't?”