Newman's Own Foundation got a law rewritten to keep its funding company

Paul Newman founded Newman's Own in 1982 on the commitment that 100% of profits would go to charity, and left his entire ownership stake to the Newman's Own Foundation when he died in 2008.

Newman's Own Foundation had no plausible way to comply without gutting its own model: selling down the company to meet the 20% ownership cap would have handed majority control to outside owners with no obligation to keep donating profits to charity, ending the entire premise of a company whose stated purpose was giving all its earnings away.

Spent a decade amending the law itself, creating a narrow exception for cases unlike the abuse it targeted, instead of restructuring to fit the rule.

The law's purpose was to stop family tax shelters, but Newman's Own gave all profits to charity, so the rule was a poor fit.

The narrow exception was scoped to prevent abuse, making it politically acceptable to pass.

The looming 200% excise tax created urgency that pushed the legislation through Congress.

The exception created a permanent legal path for similar future cases, not just a one-off fix.

When a rule forces you to dismantle what makes your model work, consider changing the rule itself if it's a poor fit for your situation, not just restructuring around it.

After an earlier attempt to include the exception in the 2017 tax overhaul was stripped out under the Senate's Byrd Rule for being unrelated to the budget, the Philanthropic Enterprise Act passed as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, signed into law 9 February 2018 — just ahead of the deadline that would otherwise have triggered a roughly 200% excise tax on the foundation's excess holdings; by that point Newman's Own had already donated over $500 million to charity across 35 years.