![\"\"](\"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/image-25.png\")
<\/a>- \n
- John Arrillaga was born on April 3, 1937, in Inglewood, California. His mother, Freda, who was originally from England, had been a nurse while his father, Gabriel, worked in a market. Gabriel traced his ancestry to the Basque Country. John\u2019s grandparents Gabriel Arrillaga and Magdalena Acarregui were both born in the Basque Country, though I haven\u2019t been able to find out where exactly.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- John came from humble beginnings. When he graduated from high school, he had to borrow a suit jacket from his chemistry teacher. However, he was a talented basketball player and went to Stanford University on a basketball scholarship. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in geology, but that wasn\u2019t the end of his basketball career. He played for both the Bilbao \u00c1guilas \u2013 a chance to explore his Basque roots \u2013 and the then\u00a0San Francisco Warriors<\/a>\u00a0in the NBA.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- In the 1960s, Arrillaga began his career in real estate, buying farmland with his partner\u00a0Richard Peery<\/a>\u00a0that they converted into office space. This was at the time when the semiconductor industry was starting to take off and Arrillaga and Peery were a huge part of the development and growth of\u00a0Silicon Valley<\/a>, providing the rising tech companies with needed space. Together, they were one of the biggest landlords in the area and in 2020, Arrillaga was listed in the top 400 of Forbes richest Americans, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Arrillaga gave back to his university, Stanford, in numerous ways, contributing to the construction of multiple buildings, including housing for graduate students and rebuilding the football stadium. He also endowed more than 50 scholarships \u2013 notable recipients of his scholarships include\u00a0Tiger Woods<\/a>,\u00a0Katie Ledecky<\/a>, and\u00a0Christian McCaffrey<\/a>. He made two donations to the university in excess of $100 million each. As a result, his name has become a fixture around the campus. The Arrillaga Science Center is just one of many buildings that bears his name.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Arrillaga died on January 24, 2022. His legacy continues on with his children, Laura and John, who continue his life of philanthropy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
A full list of all of Buber’s Basque Facts of the Week can be found in the Archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Primary sources: John Arrillaga<\/a><\/em>, Wikipedia;\u00a0John Arrillaga, longtime Stanford philanthropist and Silicon Valley real estate developer, dies at 84<\/a><\/em>, Stanford Report;\u00a0John Arrillaga, el vasco due\u00f1o de Silicon Valley<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by Ram\u00f3n Trecet, El Confidencial<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Basque names have a way of jumping out at you. I was recently attending a workshop at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, situated on the Stanford University campus, when someone mentioned the Arrillaga rec center. \u201cArrillaga?\u201d I thought to myself. \u201cHas to be Basque.\u201d Sure enough, John Arrillaga, one of Stanford\u2019s biggest supporters ever, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[836,5,19],"tags":[4175,4176,4177,4178,4180],"class_list":["post-7645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basque-fact-of-the-week","category-diaspora","category-people","tag-john-arrillaga","tag-nba","tag-silicon-valley","tag-slap-national-accelerator-laboratory","tag-stanford"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/image-25.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2sYNu-1Zj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7647,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7645\/revisions\/7647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- In the 1960s, Arrillaga began his career in real estate, buying farmland with his partner\u00a0Richard Peery<\/a>\u00a0that they converted into office space. This was at the time when the semiconductor industry was starting to take off and Arrillaga and Peery were a huge part of the development and growth of\u00a0Silicon Valley<\/a>, providing the rising tech companies with needed space. Together, they were one of the biggest landlords in the area and in 2020, Arrillaga was listed in the top 400 of Forbes richest Americans, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.<\/li>\n\n\n\n