Combine the pope, King Charles, and Bill Gates, and you get Karim al-Husayni, Aga Khan IV. He’s the forty-ninth hereditary imam of the second-largest branch of Shia Islam. He lives like a prince in an opulent chateau near Chantilly, France. And he’s a prolific philanthropist, the head of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which operates in thirty countries, spends around $1 billion per year, and employs almost 100,000 people. In 1999, Forbes called him a “venture capitalist to the poor.”

The current Aga Khan inherited his title at twenty, when he was a junior at Harvard University. With it came immense wealth and power. He may not rule a territory, but he is as good as a monarch to approximately fifteen million Nizari Ismaili Muslims, mainly concentrated in Central and South Asia; many of them tithe 10%–12% of their income to the imamate. These contributions alone give the Aga Khan an estimated annual income in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and he has been ranked one of the world’s richest royals, with a net worth of $13.3 billion. He’s spent some of this money on jets, islands, palaces, and a highly successful racehorse-breeding program. Yet he’s also invested in a network of around ninety businesses, including newspapers, hotels, telecommunications, airlines, banks, and Uganda’s largest pharmaceutical company. This empire made $2.3 billion in 2010, according to Vanity Fair.

Sixty-seven years into his career as imam, the Aga Khan has a glowing reputation. He certainly deserves praise for the work of the AKDN, which operates schools, hospitals, and economic development programs in underserved parts of the world; its influence is especially pervasive in countries such as Pakistan and Tajikistan, which have significant Nizari populations. Like many billionaire-funded NGOs, however, the AKDN has a complicated impact: its interventions provide much-needed services, but they often do so on a neoliberal model that disincentivizes states from developing alternatives that don’t depend on private largesse. The fact that a large part of the AKDN’s money comes from an aristocrat’s tithing makes the picture stranger still.