After a Young Arts Patron’s Donation Did Not Clear, He Was Found Dead

He was a regular at some of the most prestigious and glamorous events on New York’s cultural calendar, from gala performances at the Metropolitan Opera to black-tie soirees for American Ballet Theater and the Frick Collection.

And as Matthew Christopher Pietras began donating to arts organizations, he found himself eagerly courted by institutions that are desperate to find new generations of young patrons. He was invited to join the board of the Met Opera and began sponsoring galas. When the Frick Collection reopened this year after a $220 million renovation, his name had been inscribed onto a wall alongside those of other donors, and a staff position had been named for him.

Then, this May, everything went terribly awry.

Mr. Pietras, who had worked for the Soros family and described himself to people as a financial manager, arranged to transfer a $10 million donation to the Met Opera on May 28. That evening, he attended American Ballet Theater’s spring gala. The next morning, a Soros representative reached out to the Met and told the company that the money actually belonged to a member of the Soros family and not to Mr. Pietras, according to a Met official with knowledge of the institution’s actions.

The Met reached out to Mr. Pietras for an explanation, and he briefly responded that he would look into the issue, but the organization did not hear from him again. The next day, just before noon on May 30, the police were called to his apartment near Madison Square Park, where Mr. Pietras, 40, was found dead.

Mr. Pietras’s sudden death, which is still under investigation by the medical examiner, has forced the Met and the Frick to contend with a swirl of questions about his philanthropy.

For the Met Opera, which returned the $10 million after Mr. Pietras’s death, the bizarre turn of events created a real financial problem at a moment when credit ratings agencies have expressed concern about its reliance on large draws from its endowment fund. With an unexpected shortfall in its cash flow, the Met got permission from the executive committee of its board in June to draw another $5 million from its endowment to help make up the missing funds, according to the Met official. Several committee members offered to make up the remaining $5 million that the company had been counting on.

The death of Mr. Pietras, and the ripples it has sent through the arts groups he once supported, was reported in an essay in Air Mail and an exposé in New York magazine, which first disclosed many of the details, including the Met’s endowment draw. New York reported that Mr. Pietras had in fact been a personal assistant who lived vastly beyond his means by exploiting his access to the money of his two wealthy bosses: Gregory Soros, a son of the billionaire investor George Soros, and Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of the Time Warner chief Steven J. Ross.

The Soros and Ross families have been working together to investigate Mr. Pietras’s involvement with their finances and to try to figure out the extent of his unauthorized donations, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Now the arts institutions he supported are bracing for the possibility that they may have to contend with formal requests to return past donations made by Mr. Pietras.

A person familiar with the families’ outreach to the institutions said the families expect that any stolen funds would be returned to their rightful owners.

Phyllis Ryan, an executor of Mr. Pietras’s estate, declined to comment. A lawyer representing the estate did not return requests for comment.

Lawyers for the Soros and Ross families also did not respond to requests for comment.

The Frick said in a statement that it “had no reason to believe that any of the contributions were made with misappropriated funds.”

“This issue will not cause any significant financial disruption to the Frick,” the statement said.

The son of a former assistant district attorney who grew up in suburban Massachusetts, Mr. Pietras attended business school at New York University and worked for a time as a television background actor before immersing himself in the world of assisting the ultrawealthy. Working for Ms. Ross, Mr. Pietras was ultimately promoted to a “chief of staff” role, New York magazine reported.

By 2019, he was listed as a minor donor to the Met Opera and the Frick, but over the next several years, the size of his gifts ballooned. In 2024, the Frick listed him as giving between $1 million and $4,999,999 to its major fund-raising campaign. The museum named a staff position after him: the “Matthew Christopher Pietras Head of Music and Performance.” On Broadway, he received a producing credit on the chic 2024 production of “Cabaret.”

At the Met, Mr. Pietras rose to the position of managing director on the board, joining an elite body whose roster has included names like Rockefeller, Belmont, Ziff and Bass over the years. He became known for extending invitations to the opera to large contingents of his friends.

The Met official said that Mr. Pietras had portrayed himself to the organization as a financial manager who invested Soros family funds, and that before his largest pledge, he had donated about $1 million to the organization. He grew so ensconced in the institution that he served as a co-chair of a Met Opera gala in April for the opening of its new production of Strauss’s “Salome.” The gala’s chair was Daisy Soros, an advisory director on the Met’s board — and the aunt by marriage to Gregory Soros, Mr. Pietras’s boss.

Only days later, Mr. Pietras chaired another gala, this one celebrating Elizabeth Eveillard, a Met executive committee member, and her husband, Jean-Marie Eveillard, a French investor.

“It is a privilege and a joy to celebrate the two of you this evening,” read a note from Mr. Pietras in the gala’s program. “Cheers to many more nights at the opera!”

His newfound stature at the Met stemmed in large part from his promise for a major donation. He had pledged $15 million to the institution, and with the gift came plans to rename one of the opera house’s bars after him and restyle it as what he had termed a “speakeasy.” The $10 million transfer was meant to be the first installment.

The unraveling of Mr. Pietras’s pledge recalled a notorious case in which the Met had to deal with the fallout from another large gift that was not realized.

Around the turn of this century, one of the Met’s biggest donors was Alberto W. Vilar, an investor and opera buff who gave millions to the Met and other opera companies. Then he began to have trouble fulfilling his pledges. In 1998 the Met named its Grand Tier for him in recognition of a $25 million pledge to its endowment. When he failed to honor the pledge, the company removed his name and took down the foot-high metal letters from its wall. Mr. Vilar was later convicted of fraud and spent years in prison.

Joseph Volpe, who was the Met’s general manager at that time, wrote in his memoir, “The Toughest Show on Earth,” that the Vilar episode had prompted the company to try to scrutinize donors more closely. “When Vilar’s pledges went out the window, so did our balance sheet,” he wrote. “It was clear that the board needed to apply better oversight to the terms of major donations and the motives of the donor.”

More than two decades later, his successor, Peter Gelb, is managing the fallout from this questionable donor.

As the Met and other arts institutions contend with their past ties to Mr. Pietras, his friends and representatives are grappling with the many questions raised by his abrupt and so far unexplained death.

Mr. Pietras had established a will in 2022, when he was 37, that specifies a list of close friends who it says should be allowed to select items from his collection of personal property, which includes jewelry and artworks. (His cuff link collection was assigned to a specific recipient.) The will also mentions a revocable trust, of which the Metropolitan Opera is listed as a beneficiary.

In an essay for Air Mail published last month, Jane Boon, an author and the wife of the former media executive Norman Pearlstine, wrote that she befriended Mr. Pietras more than a decade ago and detailed his invitations to elaborate dinners, a Met Opera gala and a private chalet in the French Alps. Reflecting after his death, she wrote, his “dazzling lifestyle and absurd generosity couldn’t bear too much scrutiny.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.