A light rain fell at the Zurich airport one Sunday morning in January 2023 as Sarah Kate Ellis made her way from a seat in Delta’s most exclusive cabin to a waiting Mercedes.
It was there to chauffeur her to the Swiss Alps, where she and her colleagues would stay at the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week.
Ms. Ellis, who was en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, doesn’t run a Wall Street bank or a high-flying tech start-up.
She is the chief executive of the nonprofit organization GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups. The group, which has an annual budget of roughly $30 million, paid for Ms.