Rats. Besides Master Splinter, none of them are good, but one guy in Chicago seems to like them.

For more than 3 years (according to a 43rd Ward document obtained by Axios) Barre Seid, a billionaire, has hired individuals to put out nuts, seeds and other food around his house and Lincoln Park in Chicago to *checks notes* no one really knows why.

WGN Investigates reported that the workers carry matching shoulder bags, which is the most billionaire detail in this entire story. Somewhere there is a uniform policy for rat feeding. Neighbor Caroline Novak told WGN the spread was "a luxury mélange of really nice nuts," and specified Brazil nuts and walnuts. Not acorns. These squirrels are eating what you put out at a holiday party when the in-laws are coming.

Axios reporter Monica Eng went and looked, and found shells from Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, peanuts and walnuts piled at the base of trees right next to rat burrows. Novak's husband, David Pike, told WGN he counted 42 rats digging near the piles on a single walk. Forty-two. That's not an infestation, that's a roster.

The rats

The chain of events, per the Alderman's office, goes like this: the food draws flocks of pigeons, the pigeons leave droppings, and the droppings draw rats. It's the circle of life, if the circle of life were sponsored.

Ald. Timmy Knudsen (43rd) sent Seid a final warning letter last August calling the feeding a public health hazard and giving him 15 days to stop, lock his garbage in rodent-proof containers and deal with the rat harborage. Seid did not respond. Knudsen says the feeding has actually expanded in recent months, even as the city stepped up citations. And Seid keeps paying the tickets. Which, if you're worth what he's worth, is less a punishment and more a subscription fee.

Knudsen told Axios that once he runs out of aldermanic tools, "we have to get creative," and he's pushing the Chicago Park District to sue over damage to the park. He also says vendors at Green City Market, the city's flagship farmers market, are seeing rats during setup.

When neighbors and park staff have asked Seid's workers why they're doing this, Novak told Axios the workers answered with hostile language and no explanation. When Axios rang the doorbell, nobody answered. When WGN rang the doorbell, a woman opened the door and closed it again without comment. Axios did note dishes of water and cracked nut shells on the porch, which suggests the simplest explanation: the man may just really like feeding animals.

Now, a fun bit of context. This is the same 43rd Ward that in 2025 launched a rat birth control pilot program in Lincoln Park, in a city Orkin had just named America's rattiest for the 10th year in a row. So on one side, the city is quietly handing rats contraceptives. On the other side, somebody is handing them walnuts. Mixed signals. You can't tell a rat to slow down and then cater its date.

The man

So who is the Willy Wonka of Lincoln Park nuts? This is where it gets good.

Barre Seid was born in 1932, grew up on Chicago's South Side, and went to the University of Chicago. He took a job as an assistant to Graham Trippe, owner of Trippe Manufacturing, and by the mid-1960s was running the place. That company became Tripp Lite, which made surge protectors and power gear. If you've ever plugged a computer into a beige power strip, there's a decent chance you've met this man's life's work.

He was not a delegator. A longtime friend told ProPublica that Seid would personally go line by line through Tripp Lite's enormous product catalog with a pen, adjusting the prices of individual items himself. This is a man who micromanaged the cost of a six-outlet power strip. Paying a team to place walnuts in trees tracks completely.

He also really, really does not want you to know who he is. According to his own sworn testimony in a federal lawsuit, Seid and his staff sometimes gave out the name Elbert (or Ebert) Howell as Tripp Lite's CEO to dodge salesmen and mailing lists. A billionaire with a fake name to avoid telemarketers. That's not a businessman. That's a guy who invented the Do Not Call list before the government did.

The money

In 2020, Seid gave 100% of Tripp Lite's shares to the Marble Freedom Trust, a brand-new nonprofit run by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, the longtime Federalist Society figure. In 2021 the trust sold Tripp Lite to Eaton, an Irish power management company, for $1.65 billion. The trust got the proceeds.

But why give 100% of the shares to a trust and then sell the company? Taxes of course. If Barre sold the company himself, he'd owe capital gains tax on the profit. Giving the company to a trust first and then selling it means that nobody pays that tax. Tax experts told ProPublica this may have saved as much as $400 million.

That up-to-$400 million figure comes from tax experts cited by ProPublica and The Lever. The New York Times reported the $1.6 billion haul was slightly more than what 15 of the most politically active Democratic-aligned nonprofits spent combined in 2020.

And that's just the headliner. Tax records show Seid gave at least $775 million to nonprofits between 1996 and 2018, almost all of it anonymously. Among the reported recipients:

• The Heartland Institute, a suburban Chicago think tank known for disputing mainstream climate science. A longtime friend described Seid to ProPublica as the group's major patron, and Tripp Lite's CFO went on to chair Heartland's board.
• George Mason University's law school, which in 2016 received a $20 million anonymous gift brokered by Leo to rename it after Justice Antonin Scalia. Emails obtained by ProPublica appear to confirm Seid was the donor.
• Pro-Israel causes, including support that earned him an honorary degree from Bar-Ilan University in 2010.

Two more details that are too specific to make up. First, according to those same GMU emails, after the law school dean thanked him for the naming gift, Seid asked whether the dean had connections at Northwestern Law, writing: "I have nephew with LSAT 167." The dean offered the kid a full ride. Second, despite his politics, Tripp Lite sued the Trump administration in September 2020 over tariffs on Chinese electronic components. The man contains multitudes. And walnuts.

What's next

The Park District hadn't responded to Axios about the status of any lawsuit. Seid hasn't responded to anybody about anything, which, based on his track record, is the least surprising sentence in this article.

Meanwhile, Knudsen has turned the whole thing into a charity drive called "Feed your neighbors not the rats," raising money for the local hunger nonprofit Dignity Diner. He's matching donations up to $1,000, and Axios reported donors had nearly hit that by Tuesday.

Is this guy just the origin story of a new supervillain?