The Chao family
Elaine Chao and her father James Si-Cheng Chao met Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen at the Presidential Office in Taipei, Taiwan in 2016.
Elaine Chao is the oldest of six sisters, the others being Jeannette, May, Christine, Grace, and Angela.[87][88]
Grace is married to Gordon Hartogensis who was nominated by President Trump in May 2018 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a part of the Labor Department, in May 2019.[89][90][91][92] Hartogensis co-founded forecasting-software company Petrolsoft in 1989, which was purchased for $60 million by Aspen Technology in 2000;[90] he founded and led application software company Auric Technology LLC until it was sold to a company based in Mexico in 2011, and then helped govern the Hartogensis Family Trust.[92][90]
In April 2008 Chao's father gave Chao and McConnell between $5 million and $25 million,[93] which "boosted McConnell's personal worth from a minimum of $3 million in 2007 to more than $7 million"[94] and "helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year".[95]
In 2012 the Chao family donated $40 million to Harvard Business School for scholarships for students of Chinese heritage and the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center, an executive education building named for Chao's late mother.[96][97] It is the first Harvard Business School building named after a woman,[98] and the first building named after an American of Asian ancestry.[99] Ruth Mulan Chu Chao returned to school at age 51 to earn a master's degree in Asian literature and history from St. John's University in the Queens borough of New York City.[87]