Matthew John Symonds (born 20 December 1953) is a British journalist and, since 2018, the executive director of the Larry Ellison Foundation. He was a co-founder of The Independent in 1986. Born in 1953, Symonds is the son of John Beavan, who at the time was London editor of The Guardian, and BBC World Service broadcaster Anne Symonds. He worked for the Mirror group, the Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph, which he joined in November 1981 as economics leader writer, before in 1986 becoming a co-founder of The Independent, with Andreas Whittam Smith and Stephen Glover. The three had worked together at The Daily Telegraph and had all left the newspaper towards the end of Lord Hartwell's ownership of it.