George Soros

Date of Birth: 08.12.1930

George Soros (Hung. Soros György - György Schwartz, Engl. George Soros, Birth name - Schwartz) - American trader, financier, patron, investor, philosopher. Advocate of the theory of open society and opponent of 'market fundamentalism'. Adherent of Karl Popper's ideas. Born Esperantist. Founder of the charity network known as the 'Soros Foundation'. Member of the Executive Committee of the International Crisis Group. His wealth was estimated at 24.9 billion US dollars in 2016.

Place of Birth. Education. Born on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary. Born into a middle-class Jewish family. His father Tivadar Schwartz was a lawyer, a significant figure in the city's Jewish community, an Esperanto specialist, and an Esperanto writer. In 1936, the family changed their name to the Hungarian variant Soros.

In 1947, Soros moved to England, where he studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and graduated successfully three years later. He was taught by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who had a significant influence on him and with whom he became an ideological heir. At the same time, he worked as a manager's assistant in a leather goods factory.

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Career. From 1953 to 1956, he worked at Singer & Friedlander in London.

In 1956, he moved to New York, USA.

From 1956 to 1963, he was a broker and financial analyst at Wetheim & Co., dealing with international arbitration. He invented a new trading method - internal arbitration.

From 1963 to 1966, he was working on his philosophical dissertation 'The Burden of Consciousness'.

In 1967, he founded with a capital of 100,000 US dollars the company Arnhold & S.Bleichroeder a hedge fund with a capital of 4 million US dollars.

In 1969, he became the director and co-owner of the Double Eagle Fund.

In 1970, he founded an investment firm that later became known as the Quantum Group.

In 1979, he established the first charity fund 'Open Society' in the USA.

In 1984, he founded a charity fund in Hungary.

In 1988, he organized a fund in the USSR 'Cultural Initiative to Support Science, Culture, and Education'. However, the fund was soon closed as the money was misappropriated.

In 1990, he founded the Central European University in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw.

On September 16, 1992, he earned a billion dollars through the fall of the pound sterling and received the nickname 'The Man Who Broke the Bank of England'.

In 1995, the capital of the Quantum Fund group was estimated at over 10 billion USD, and Soros's personal income accounted for about a third of that amount.

In 1997, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused Soros during the economic crisis of several countries in the Asia-Pacific region - Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines - of attacking the currencies of those countries. Soros denied the accusations and blamed the state financial structures of the Asian countries where loans grew too quickly for the situation.

In 2000, Soros incurred losses of nearly 3 billion USD due to the collapse of the NASDAQ index. Subsequently, a restructuring of Quantum was carried out, and a shift to a lower-risk strategy was announced.

In 2002, Soros was found guilty by a Paris court of profiting from insider information. According to the court, the billionaire earned about 2 million dollars on Société Générale's shares from this information. He was fined 2.2 million euros.

In 2006, he was ranked 27th on the list of the richest people in the USA. His income was estimated by Forbes magazine at 8.7 billion US dollars.

He is an honorary doctor of the New School for Social Research (New York), Oxford University, and Yale.

Financier. In 1956, he moved to the USA and founded an international investment fund that brought him income. Today he leads the fund named after him.

Philanthropist. The first fund - the Open Society Fund - was established by Soros in 1979 in New York, and the first Eastern European fund - in 1984 in Hungary. Today, he funds a network of funds operating in 31 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as in South Africa, Haiti, and the USA. The activities of the funds aim to develop and support the infrastructure of open societies. In Ukraine, the Soros International Renaissance Fund was established.

Today, the Soros Fund network spans over 100 countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, and the USA.