George Soros
George Soros is a self-made multibillionaire known primarily for his success in financial investments and philanthropy. Born György Schwartz in Hungary in 1930, he survived the Holocaust and later emigrated to the UK and the US, where he built a notable career on Wall Street. Soros founded the Quantum Fund in 1970, achieving significant returns and gaining fame for his speculative strategy of short-selling currencies, particularly during the 1992 British pound crisis. Over the years, he transitioned into philanthropy, establishing the Open Society Foundations, which advocate for human rights, democratic governance, and social reform, particularly in post-communist countries.
Throughout his career, Soros has been a controversial figure, often criticized for his financial practices and political involvement, including significant donations to liberal political causes in the U.S. His philanthropic efforts have sometimes sparked conspiracy theories, particularly regarding his influence in political and social issues, often accompanied by anti-Semitic undertones. Despite stepping back from day-to-day operations in 2023, Soros remains a prominent figure in discussions about philanthropy, economic policy, and civil society, having donated over $32 billion to various causes since the early 1990s.
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George Soros
Hungarian-born American financier and philanthropist
- Born: August 12, 1930
- Place of Birth: Budapest, Hungary
A self-made multibillionaire from financial investment and speculation, Soros became one of the world’s most important philanthropists and championed the idea of an open society, a society governed as nonauthoritarian, transparent, flexible, representative, and responsive to the needs of its citizens.
Early Life
Born György Schwartz in Hungary to a Jewish family on August 12, 1930, George Soros (SOHR-ohs) and his family evaded capture when Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in 1944 and began persecuting the country's Jewish population as part of the Holocaust. Soros was raised speaking Esperanto. At the age of fourteen, he witnessed the deportation of Jews from Budapest but was able to avoid deportation himself by posing as the godson of a Christian family. In 1946, he escaped the Soviet occupation of his homeland by leaving the country to participate in an Esperanto youth congress. He immigrated to London in 1947, studied at the London School of Economics with German philosopher Karl Popper, and received a BA degree there. He began work at the merchant bank Singer and Friedlander before moving to New York City in 1956, where he took a job as a money manager on Wall Street.
Soros began his financial career as an arbitrage trader and an analyst. From 1963, he worked at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, an international investment management firm, and eventually became the company’s vice president. In 1967, the firm set up an offshore investment fund, First Eagle, at his urging. He was then given the task of running the new fund.
Life’s Work
In 1970, Soros, with investor Jim Rogers, founded the hedge fund Quantum Fund. During the next ten years, the fund returned 3,365 percent. Soros reorganized Quantum Fund in 2000. Most spectacularly, he made his name in financial circles by short-selling the British pound in 1992 on Black Wednesday with protégé Stanley Druckenmiller. They profited from the Bank of England’s failure to raise its interest rates to levels that were comparable to those of other countries of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the Bank of England’s failure to float its currency. Soros netted more than $1 billion because of the bank’s errors.
Soros’s financial investments were not always astute. He lost several hundred million dollars, for example, investing in the Russian telecom firm Svyazinvest, which privatized in the late 1990s. In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, he was accused by the Malaysian prime minister of exploiting a situation in which the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was struggling to prop up its new member, Burma (Myanmar). In France, Soros was convicted of insider trading in a takeover bid of the French bank Société Générale in 1988. However, nearly twenty years later, in 2006, he appealed to Europe’s court of human rights, claiming that he did not receive a fair hearing because of the fourteen-year delay in bringing the case to trial.
Soros advocated the model of a mixed economy, in which a strong, centralized government could correct excesses resulting from self-interest. Aware of appearing hypocritical in light of this model, Soros distinguished between a businessperson participating in the market and a businessperson working to change the rules, thus absolving himself of the consequences of his financial actions.
By the 1990s Soros had begun establishing himself as a philanthropist, primarily through his Open Society Foundations, which promoted human rights, social reform, and democratic principles. In 1991 his financial support helped create Central European University, an international, accredited, graduate university in Budapest, which focuses on the social sciences and the humanities and the development of open societies.
An open society is one governed as nonauthoritarian, transparent, nonsecretive, flexible, representative, and responsive to the needs of its citizens. In part because human and political rights form the foundation of all open societies, Soros has promoted the establishment of open societies in former communist countries. Because of his advocacy, he has been credited by some for helping to hasten the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
Soros also contributed to high-profile political campaigns. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Soros spent an estimated $27 million trying to unseat Republican US president George W. Bush. Following Bush’s reelection, however, Soros and other liberal political donors helped to found Democracy Alliance, an informal fund-raising group. Leading up to the 2010 elections, Soros donated $1 million in support of California Proposition 19, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to legalize marijuana in that state. In 2012, Soros donated $1 million to Priorities USA Action, a political action committee (PAC) that supported the reelection of US president Barack Obama. In 2015 and 2016, he donated a total of $9.5 million to the PAC, which was then supporting the ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Soros was one of several individuals with high-profile involvement in left-wing politics who was targeted in an apparent act of domestic terrorism in which a pipe bomb was delivered to his home. (Soros was not at home when the package containing the bomb arrived, and the caretaker who collected Soros's mail that day correctly identified the package as suspicious and immediately contacted the police, whose bomb squad safely detonated the device.)
Soros also openly criticized US intervention in Iraq, arguing that Iraq’s power as an enemy of the United States had been overstated. Internationally, his funding and behind-the-scenes networking among opposition parties in the Georgian Rose Revolution of 2003, which displaced Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, was considered by some observers to have been crucial to the revolution’s success, although Soros has said his role was “greatly exaggerated.” Soros also promoted a common European foreign policy and studied the integration of Muslim residents in eleven European cities. He spoke out against the powerful Washington lobby group American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), arguing for the need for an alternative to AIPAC, which supported the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the 2006 Israeli attack on Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. He contributed to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) doing humanitarian work with refugees in Europe, leading the right-wing, anti-immigration Hungarian government to consider him an enemy of the state. As a result, Soros moved the headquarters of his Open Society Foundations from Budapest to Berlin in 2018.
These actions in Hungary mirrored the far-right response to Soros's actions in other European countries as well as the United States. By the 2020s, some of Soros's charitable efforts had led to a number of conspiracy theories about his life and work; many of these conspiracy theories about Soros were characterized by some observers as anti-Semitic.
Soros’s first written work while an arbitrage analyst in New York was a Popperian treatise on philosophy, “The Burden of Consciousness: A Study of the Relationship between Thinking and Society,” which has not been published. His first popular publication, however, was The Alchemy of Finance (1987), which started out as an exposition of financial strategies and instruments in real-time and included the development of a philosophy of reflexivity, also based on Popper’s ideas. Reflexivity, as embraced by Soros, is the belief that a person’s self-awareness cannot be considered separate from that person’s immediate environment: a person’s actions can disrupt economic equilibriums and, thus, disable the progression of free market systems.
Other books by Soros, namely The Age of Fallibility (2006), concentrate on broader, philosophical issues. Soros once thought that the United States was the world’s best example of an open society. However, in The Age of Fallibility, he concludes that the United States cannot quite fill that role because its founding documents, replete with Enlightenment language, fail to incorporate a more modern skepticism that recognizes the limitations of the human mind. In his book Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States (2012), Soros analyzes the national and international policies that contributed to the global financial crisis of 2007–2010.
Soros received honorary doctorates from several institutions, including the New School for Social Research in New York City, Oxford University, the Budapest University of Economics, and Yale University. He also received a finance award from the Yale School of Management as well as the Laurea Honoris Causa, the highest honor bestowed by the University of Bologna.
In 2015, Forbes magazine named Soros one of the world’s richest individuals with an estimated net worth of $26 billion as of September 18, 2015. As a major philanthropist, he gave away more than $32 billion between early 1990s and early 2020s. He also remained active in charitable efforts and politics at that time; for example, during the 2022 midterm elections in the United States, he donated $128.5 million to support various candidates in the Democratic Party.
In June 2023, Soros stepped back from his day-to-day running of the Open Society Foundations and other financial ventures; he handed control of these various enterprises to his son, Alex. In large part due to his philanthropic efforts, by June 2024 Soros's wealth had decreased to $6.7 billion.
Significance
From firsthand experience of penury, genocide, and hyperinflation on the streets of Budapest at the end of World War II, Soros made himself into a multibillionaire through his skills in financial management. As a business leader, he has been keen to delegate authority to local managers rather than micromanage his foundations. Soros also became a major philanthropist, primarily concerned with civil society issues, but he also branched out to fund organizations focused on the problems of world poverty, environmental protection, drug policy reform, public health, and education.
Bibliography
"George Soros." Forbes, 7 Jun. 2024, www.forbes.com/profile/george-soros/?sh=7b93ee0f2024. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
“George Soros: Founder.” Open Society Foundations, www.opensocietyfoundations.org/george-soros. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
“George Soros’s Democracy Alliance: In Search of a Permanent Democratic Majority.” Foundation Watch Dec. 2006.
Hooker, Lucy. "George Soros Hands Reins of $25bn Empire to Son Alex." BBC News, 11 Jun. 2023, www.bbc.com/news/business-65874494. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
“How We Work.” Open Society Foundations, www.opensocietyfoundations.org/how-we-work. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Kaufman, Michael T. Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Preston, Caroline. “At 80, George Soros Looks ahead to His Legacy.” Chronicle of Philanthropy 23.13 (2011): 21.
Rashbaum, William K. "At George Soros’s Home, Pipe Bomb Was Likely Hand-Delivered, Officials Say." The New York Times, 23 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/nyregion/soros-caravan-explosive-bomb-home.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Slater, Robert. Soros: The Unauthorized Biography The Life, Times, and Trading Secrets of the World’s Greatest Investor. New York: Irwin Professional, 1997. Print.