George Soros

Open full sized image

George Soros.

© World Economic Forum/swiss-image.ch/Photo by Michael Wuertenberg

George Sorosis a Hungarian-born American financier, author, philanthropist, and activist whose success as an investor made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. He is also known as a powerful and influential supporter of liberal social causes.

Soros, who was born into a prosperous Jewish family, had his upbringing disrupted by the Nazis’ arrival in Hungary in 1944. The family split up and used false papers to avoid being sent to concentration camps. In 1947 they moved to London. Soros studied philosophy under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, but he abandoned his plans to become a philosopher. He joined the London merchant bank Singer & Friedlander. In 1956 he moved to New York City, where he worked initially as an analyst of European securities and rapidly made his mark.

In 1973 Soros established the Soros Fund (later Quantum Endowment Fund), a hedge fund that subsequently spawned a range of associated companies. His daring investment decisions caused the funds to grow rapidly, but not all his gambles succeeded. He correctly foresaw the worldwide stock market crash of October 1987—but wrongly predicted that Japanese stocks would fall hardest of all.

Soros’s status as an almost mythical financier was established in September 1992 when the British government devalued the pound sterling. Through his Quantum group of companies, Soros had sold billions of pounds during the days preceding devaluation, much of it purchased with borrowed money. Afterward Soros bought back pounds, repaid the money he had borrowed, and made a profit of about $1 billion. Others also profited from the pound’s fall, but the scale of Soros’s operations dwarfed those of everyone else, and the gambit earned him the nickname “the man who broke the Bank of England.” In 1994, however, his instincts appeared to fail him—at least temporarily—as he speculated that the dollar would rise in value against the Japanese yen. Instead, the dollar fell all year, and the Quantum Fund reportedly lost hundreds of millions on a single day in February.

Although he denied involvement in speculative attacks on the Thai baht in 1997, Soros’s name was soon linked with the financial crisis that swept Asia the following year. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad singled out Soros, stating that he was responsible for the decline of the ringgit. In reality, Soros’s funds had lost billions as a result of the crisis. Soros recovered with early gains on Internet stocks in 1999, but his investment style became more conservative in the wake of the implosion of the technology bubble in 2000. In December 2002 a French court convicted Soros of insider trading for a 1988 stock deal involving financial services company Société Générale, and he was fined €2.2 million ($2.9 million). Soros appealed the ruling, but it was upheld by the Cour de Cassation (France’s highest court) in 2006. Facing new federal regulations concerning hedge funds, Soros announced in July 2011 that the Quantum Endowment Fund would no longer manage the money of outside investors. Instead, it would only handle the assets of Soros and his family.

In 1984 Soros used some of his profits to create the Open Society Foundations, a philanthropic organization that included a network of foundations. Much of the initial work focused on eastern Europe—starting with Hungary, where he awarded scholarships, provided technical assistance, and helped modernize schools and businesses. Even though Hungary was still a communist state, Soros obtained guarantees that his foundation could operate without government interference.

As the Cold War ended and the Soviet regime collapsed, Soros established foundations in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, and Yugoslavia. Some critics argued that he was being inconsistent—condemning “short-termism” in Western governments while making money from short-term currency speculation. However, he continued to spend significant sums to help establish democracy in eastern Europe and elsewhere. In the early 21st century Open Society Foundations was active in more than 70 countries. In 2017 it was reported that Soros had given some $18 billion to the organization in recent years, making it one of the world’s largest philanthropic groups.

Open full sized image

George Soros, 2008.

Win McNamee—Getty Images/Thinkstock

Soros was also involved in political activism and other philanthropic efforts. In 2003 he provided start-up funding for the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, and he pledged millions of dollars to groups such as MoveOn.org to oppose the reelection of Pres. George W. Bush, a Republican, in 2004. He later was a prominent supporter of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and he donated to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and to Joe Biden in 2020. In 2010 Soros gave $100 million to the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch. With his support of Democrats and liberal causes, Soros frequently drew criticism from Republicans and conservatives, and he was often the focus of unfounded conspiracy theories.

Soros wrote several books, including The Alchemy of Finance (1987), The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998), and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means (2008). He was the subject of the documentary Soros (2019).