George Soros

GEORGE SOROS
George Soros experienced ethnic and political intolerance firsthand. Born in Hungary in 1930, he lived
through the Nazi occupation of 1944–1945, which resulted in the murder of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews.
His own Jewish family survived by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping
others do the same. Soros later recalled that “not only did we survive, but we managed to help others.”
As the Communists consolidated power in Hungary after the war, Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London,
working part-time as a railway porter and as a night-club waiter to support his studies at the London School
of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States, entering the world of finance and investments,
where he made his fortune. In 1973, he launched his own hedge fund and went on to become one of the
most successful investors in the history of the United States.
George Soros began his philanthropy in 1979, giving scholarships to Black South Africans under apartheid. In
the 1980s, he helped promote the open exchange of ideas in Communist Hungary by funding academic visits
to the West and supporting fledgling independent cultural groups, as well as other initiatives. After the fall of
the Berlin Wall, he created Central European University as a space to foster critical thinking—which at that
time was an alien concept for most universities in the former Communist bloc.
With the Cold War over, he gradually expanded his philanthropy to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United
States, supporting a vast array of new efforts to create more accountable, transparent, and democratic
societies. He was one of the early prominent voices to criticize the war on drugs as “arguably more harmful
than the drug problem itself,” and helped kick-start America’s medical marijuana movement. In the early
2000s, he became a vocal backer of same-sex marriage efforts. Though his causes have evolved over time,
they continue to hew closely to his ideals of an open society.
Throughout Soros’s philanthropic career, one thing has remained constant: a commitment to fighting the
world’s most intractable problems. He has been known to emphasize the importance of tackling losing
causes. Indeed, many of the issues Soros has taken on—and he would be the first to admit this—are the types
of issues for which a complete solution might never emerge.
Singer and Friedlander

In 1954, Soros began his financial career at the merchant bank Singer & Friedlander of London. He worked as
a clerk and later moved to the arbitrage department. A fellow employee, Robert Mayer, suggested he apply
at his father's brokerage house, F.M. Mayer of New York
From 1963 to 1973, Soros's experience as a vice president at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder resulted in little
enthusiasm for the job; business was slack following the introduction of the Interest Equalization Tax, which
undermined the viability of Soros's European trading. He spent the years from 1963 to 1966 with his main
focus on the revision of his philosophy dissertation. In 1966 he started a fund with $100,000 of the firm's
money to experiment with his trading strategies.
Soros received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University
of Oxford in 1980, the Corvinus University of Budapest, and Yale University in 1991. He received an honorary
degree in economics from the University of Bologna in 1995.[283]
In 2008, he was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame along with
Alfred Jones, Bruce Kovner, David Swensen, Jack Nash, James Simons, Julian Roberston, Kenneth Griffin, Leon
Levy, Louis Bacon, Michael Steinhardt, Paul Tudor Jones, Seth Klarman and Steven A. Cohen.[284]
In January 2014, Soros was ranked number 1 in LCH Investments list of top 20 managers having posting gains
of almost $42 billion since the launch of his Quantum Endowment Fund in 1973.[285]
In July 2017, Soros was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy (HonFBA), the United Kingdom's
national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[286]
Soros was the Financial Times Person of the Year for 2018, with the FT describing him as "a standard bearer
for liberal democracy, an idea under siege from populists".[287]
In April 2019, Soros was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Courage.[288] In his acceptance address Soros said:
"In my native Hungary, the government of [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán has turned me into the super villain
of an alleged plot to destroy the supposed Christian identity of the Hungarian nation... [I] donate the prize
money associated with this award to the Hungarian Spectrum, an online English-language publication that
provides daily updates on Hungarian politics. It renders an important service by exposing to the world [in
English] what Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is telling his own people [in Hungarian]. It [Hungarian Spectrum]
deserves to be better known and supported.

George Soros

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GEORGE SOROS

Singer and Friedlander

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