Soros biography. Biography of George Soros

George Soros is an American financier, trader and investor, also famous for his philanthropic activities. Soros's life path gives rise to many doubts and is regarded ambiguously: some talk about him as a noble creator of a network of charitable institutions, others call him a speculator who is also guilty of currency crises.

George Soros was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest. His real name is Gyorgy Shoros. The future financier was born into a middle-income family of Jewish origin. Father Tivadar Shorosh worked in the legal industry and also tried to publish his own magazine in the little popular Esperanto. Tivadar participated in the First World War and managed to return to his native Budapest only after three years of captivity in Siberia.

Therefore, his father taught George, first of all, the art of survival. Elizabeth's mother, who did not know such horrors of war, looked at the world in a positive way and introduced her son to art. Most of all, young Soros liked painting and drawing. In addition, he made great progress in learning foreign languages: in addition to his native Hungarian, he spoke English, German and French. The guy was also interested in sailing, swimming, and tennis. And from a young age, I always beat my friends at Monopoly.

Classmates recall that at school the future financier behaved impudently and defiantly, and loved to participate in fights. At the same time, he has an excellent tongue, and what he believed in, Soros defended almost at the cost of his life. George was an average student, sometimes demonstrating results, sometimes slipping to the level of a C student.


Soros was less than 10 years old when the brutal and merciless Second World War began. The million-strong community of Hungarian Jews began to live in fear that they would suffer the same fate as their exterminated compatriots from other European countries. The lifestyle of the Soros family has become a constant desire to hide. For weeks they huddled in basements, or, at best, in the basements and attics of the houses of friends who agreed to host them for a few days.

Tivadar Shorosh was engaged in forgery of documents in those days. Thanks to this, the man saved the lives of his family members and other Jews, although he was threatened with execution for this. In the fall of 1945, when the danger had finally passed, George Soros went back to school. But life in constant fear of extermination by the Nazis left its mark on him: the guy passionately wanted to go to the West, to leave his native Hungary. He began to implement this plan in 1947, when he was seventeen years old, alone. However, Soros was helped financially by his father, as well as his aunt, who moved to Florida.


First, George visited Bern, Switzerland, then went to London. There he periodically found ways to earn a living: either he got a job as a waiter in a restaurant, or picked apples on a farm, or learned the profession of a painter. And in 1949 he entered the London School of Economics, completing his studies in an accelerated format in two years. Soros was formally registered as a student at the school for another year and received his diploma only in 1953.

A diploma from an economics school did not at all guarantee George a job, and he again had to do odd jobs. However, then the future millionaire already realized that in order to receive large incomes it was necessary to “join” the investment business. My first job in the financial sector was as an intern at Singer & Friedlander Bank. And in 1956, the novice investor realized that it was time to move to New York.

Business

George began his career in New York by purchasing securities in one state and selling them in another (this is called international arbitrage). When the United States introduced an additional tax on foreign investments in 1963, the financier considered the business not profitable enough and closed it.

A few years later, Soros worked as the head of research at the brokerage company Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, and a couple of years later he became the manager of the Double Eagle fund, which was founded by this company. In 1973, Soros left his employers and founded his own foundation called Quantum. Jim Rogers became the junior partner in this business, and the assets of Double Eagle investors were taken as the basis for organizing the fund.


The Quantum fund specialized in speculation in currencies, securities, and commodities. By the end of the 1980s, George Soros's fortune had already exceeded one hundred million dollars. Over a long period of time, the Soros and Rogers fund was successful, but it also had unsuccessful periods. For example, during “Black Monday” in 1987, when one of the largest stock market crashes in the history of mankind occurred, George ordered the closing of existing positions and withdrawal into cash. Before this decision, the fund’s annual profit level reached 60%, but after this, Quantum not only lost profitability, but also went negative: in annual terms, the loss rate was 10%.

Soon, Soros decided to involve the titled asset manager Stanley Druckenmiller in the work of the fund, with the help of whom the financier managed to further increase his wealth. Stanley worked at Quantum until 2000.

An important date for George was September 16, 1992, when the pound sterling collapsed. The businessman earned over a billion dollars from this event, and Soros is often called one of the culprits of this collapse.


At the end of the 1990s, the billionaire spoke warmly about Russia and even decided to do joint business with an entrepreneur. Together with him, he acquired a quarter of the shares of Svyazinvest OJSC, which depreciated by half after the 1998 crisis broke out. Subsequently, George Soros called this acquisition the worst investment.

As a financier ages, he becomes less and less interested in investing and trading on the stock exchange and spends more time on charity. In 2011, he announced that his investment fund would cease operations. Since then, Soros has been engaged in financial transactions only to increase his own capital and increase the well-being of his own family.

Fund

George Soros's hedge fund, Open Society, was founded in 1979. The billionaire's funds have been created in several dozen countries. Including his organization (the Soviet-American Cultural Initiative Foundation) worked in the USSR. It was founded to support culture, science and education, but was closed due to high levels of corruption.


At the end of the twentieth century, the Soros Foundation spent about one hundred million dollars on the Russian project “University Internet Centers,” thanks to which 33 universities had what were then high-tech Internet centers. For many years, the Open Society Institute provided grants to members of the cultural and scientific community, but these payments ceased in 2004.

In 2015, the Soros Foundation was included in the list of undesirable non-profit organizations for the Russian Federation, which is why its work in the country is now impossible. However, a number of charitable and non-profit foundations created in Russia with the support of this organization still operate to this day.

State

In 2017, George Soros's fortune was estimated at $25.2 billion. Some investors believe that he is endowed with an incredible gift of financial foresight, while others see the reasons for his success in the use of secret inside information.


The billionaire himself developed a theory of stock market reflexivity, which explains the impressive growth of his wealth. He wrote books about his views on financial reality: “The Alchemy of Finance”, “The Crisis of World Capitalism”, “The Bubble of American Supremacy” and others.

Personal life

George Soros's first wife is Annalize Witshak, with whom the financier lived for 23 years. His second wife is Susan Weber, whom he married in the same 1983. She was a quarter of a century younger than her new husband and was an art critic in New York. This family existed for 22 years.


After his divorce from Susan, the billionaire dated Adriana Ferreira, a popular Brazilian television star. However, Soros still did not marry the Latin American beauty, and after the separation she sued him. The woman demanded that the investor pay her $50 million as compensation for harassment, moral damages and battery.

In modern photos of George Soros, you can see that this man, despite his advanced age, is still ready to lead an active life. A clear proof of this is the story of his new marriage: in 2013, George tied the knot with 42-year-old dietary supplement saleswoman and yoga specialist Tamiko Bolton. The wedding took place at the Karamoor Music and Arts Center and was attended by 500 people.


From his first two marriages, the billionaire has five children: sons Alexander, Jonathan, Gregory and Robert, and daughter Andrea. Some children followed in the footsteps of their financier father: Jonathan first worked in his investment fund, and then founded his own company.

George Soros now

The biography of George Soros has many times become the basis for gossip and gossip. For example, in the fall of 2016 there was a rumor that the billionaire had died. In the same year, Ukraine reported about the financier’s secret visit: Soros allegedly intends to use the country to destabilize the Russian economy. Such “facts” exist at the level of speculation, since no serious evidence has been presented in their favor.

England, philanthropist and patron of the arts, who openly fought the communist regime.

Biography

Gyorgy Schwarz, born on August 12 in Budapest 1930 into a wealthy family of Hungarian Jews. Father Tivadar, after military captivity on the fronts of the First World War and a career as a lawyer, managed the inheritance of his wife, Erzebet Sutz.

The boy received the surname Soros from his father, who replaced it in 1936. The availability of funds helped the family survive the Second World War, avoiding persecution by the Nazis, thanks to false documents.

The future investment genius mastered economics at the London School of Economics, where his father sent him two years after the end of World War II.

After graduating from school (1949-1952) with a bachelor's degree, the future financier moved to the USA, where his father had connections on Wall Street.

Having taken a job in New York, USA in 1956, Soros went from a simple trader to a fund manager within 13 years, becoming a co-owner of the fund in 1969.

Significant facts of the biography as an investor and manager include a series of losses in the early and late nineties, the “minimum risk” policy introduced in the Quantum Fund, and the refusal to earn money from outside investors in his declining years.

The charitable activities of the philanthropist-financier began in the early 70s, as soon as money began to flow, subsequently organized under the roof of the Open Society Foundation, which eventually grew into a network dating back to 1979.

Despite accusations from the media that donations are biased, in fact the list of programs awarded Soros grants is quite wide and diverse, but the geographical bias of the active development of the network of funds opened since 1984 in Eastern Europe and the USSR was obvious. According to the investor’s colleagues, billions of dollars were spent on opening this network; the funds came from Soros Fund Management under the personal control of the fund’s creator.

In 2001, the financier entered into an open debate with the Bush Jr. administration, accusing him of curtailing the course towards democracy. The peak of the confrontation came in the 2004 elections, when a sum of $27 million was spent to oppose the re-election of US President George Soros. Being an opponent of George Bush, Soros did not welcome his opponent in the form of the Democratic Party.

George Soros carried the ideas instilled by Karl Popper to protect the “Open Society” from tyranny, trampling the democracy of heads of state, throughout his life. With the election of Donald Trump, now an elderly politician rather than an investor, as President of the United States, a “new crusade” has been launched.

George Soros is not stopped by years and failures, which are gradually losing the influence of a network of funds, some of which have been closed (in Russia since 2003), some are under threat of closure, even in the master’s homeland, Hungary.

Over a 70-year career, the investor managed to amass $25 billion in capital, making influential enemies in the Old and New Worlds. How the struggle for democratic values, according to George Soros, will end remains to be seen. The confrontation between the newly elected President and the financier is just beginning.

The Trader's Path

Fifteen-year-old Soros first gained experience in currency speculation in England, working as a “currency changer” on the black market. By that time, the family had lost their fortune in communist Hungary and Soros was forced to earn his own “living.”

The first step in Soros’ ascent to fame as a currency speculator and successful manager is considered to be work in a US brokerage house, but the strategy of arbitrage of government debt of various countries, which he began to promote, was gleaned from his short time working in the UK. The investment firm Singer and Friedlander provided the trader with the opportunity to learn the intricacies of arbitrage operations before emigrating to the United States.

Mayer, the owner of a brokerage firm in New York on Wall Street, put the young Soros to work in the international arbitration department.

In 1956, the goal of a novice trader was to earn half a million dollars. Working on the arbitration of government bonds, he came up with “internal arbitrage” - the purchase of warrants and bonds against the sale of shares of “local” enterprises preparing for an additional issue before this event.

With these ideas of internal and external arbitrage, the future prominent investor ended up in the investment firm Wertheim & Co, which, after the death of senior partners in 1950, reoriented its business from investment and consulting services (real estate) to analytics and stock speculation.

Having learned over 14 years to develop economic forecasts, constructing curves and marking areas of real market movements that do not coincide with the forecast ones, George Soros identified them as cycles of “virtuous cycles of expansion and vicious cycles of decline.”

Having put the last point in the tests of the reflexivity strategy, in 1966 the financier opens an investment fund with a capital of 100,000 US dollars. Having made his name in 1969 by co-founding the hedge fund Double Eagle, Soros contributes $250,000 to four million in investor funds. This fund, having “accelerated” to 12 million, formed the basis of a long-term collaboration between George Soros and Jim Rogers.

The investor opened his personal fund Soros Fund Management in 1979. Soros' partners and sons alternate at the helm of the hedge fund.

Currently, the financier has reclassified the fund as a “family” fund, distributing funds to co-investors, but until 2010, while the fund’s reporting was public, the average return on investment was 20% (for 40 years).

The creation of Soros Fund Management caused a “conflict of interest.” The Double Eagle hedge fund was affiliated with Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder. George Soros is forced to resign from leadership positions, offering Double Eagle investors options on shares of Soros Fund Management, luring them to himself.

In 1973, George Soros and partner Jim Rogers split from Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, renaming the fund Quantum. Successes in the trading field made Soros recognizable; half of the fund’s funds consisted of the capital of the Rothschilds, who invested 6 million US dollars at the “start”.

Since 2011, the fund has been managing only the Soros family capital, investing currency in shares and making venture investments. The financial result of Quantum for 2013 is a profit of 5.3 billion US dollars. Over the entire period, the fund has transferred more than 40 billion US dollars to investors’ accounts.

The partners registered a hedge fund offshore, setting the premium rate for managing investor funds at 20%. The bulk of the bonus was used for reinvestment and increasing the share of own funds.

The peak of funds from investors who trusted Quantum occurred in 1981 - the fund’s capital was $400 million, after a 22% loss the funds decreased to $200 million.

George Soros and Quantum entered trading history by breaking the laws of the market. According to the rules, it is considered impossible for the state or one trader to oppose themselves to the market. No matter how much money you have, the market will be able to crush a trader with any amount trading “against the crowd.”

According to the theory of reflexivity, the Bank of England, which entered the European currency peg system ERM, was mistaken in the interest rate of the peg to the ECU (predecessor of the euro). Taking advantage of the Bank of England's responsibility to maintain the pound sterling within a certain range of maximum deviations from a basket of European currencies, Soros played a short position, selling the British currency for several months in huge amounts.

On Wednesday 16 September 1992, the size of the pound short reached £10 billion. The UK refused to maintain interest rates pegged to European rates and was withdrawn from the ERM system by devaluing the pound. Soros's profit amounted to 1 billion US dollars. UK losses were estimated at 3.5 billion pounds sterling.

George Soros calls himself an atheist, unlike many ethnic Jews, he has never helped, as is customary, to Jewish communities and the state of Israel, despite the fact that spending for charitable purposes accounts for half of his fortune.

This fact is associated with an incident in his youth, when Soros, living in need, was denied help by the local Jewish community on the grounds of “betrayal of the Faith.” Young George arrived in Great Britain with false documents in which he was listed as a Christian.

Soros drew ideas for the fight against the communist regime from philosophy teacher Karl Popper, a world-famous philosopher, author of the work “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” recognized as the greatest scientific book of the 20th century.

All the more interesting is the fact that there are two options for choosing a place to study, between Moscow and London. According to the financier himself, he insisted on Moscow, seduced by the ideas of socialism, while his father chose London.

According to George Soros, he was hired out of pity; the managing director turned out to be a Hungarian compatriot. In companies and banks there was refusal or humiliation during interviews. The main career of a bachelor's degree in economics was built in Foggy Albion as a traveling salesman and haberdashery seller.

From his first steps in the United States, the currency speculator and investor perceived the new opportunities for personal enrichment as a tool for earning savings that would allow him to return to England and engage in philosophy.

It so happens that an obsession with the ideas of Karl Popper helped develop the theory of “market reflexivity”, which was adapted to financial markets and became the basis of a lifelong investment strategy.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad openly accused the financier of “man-making” the Asian crisis of the late 90s, but later, in 2000, he apologized and admitted his mistake.

The investor's response to constant crises was the creation of INET - the “Institute of New Economic Thinking” to train economists of new thinking. According to the theory of George Soros, the culprits of the crisis were constantly an erroneous perception of economic reality and the actions of the state economic bloc.

Family

George Soros has been married and divorced twice and has children from different marriages.

His first marriage to Annaliese Witscheck produced two sons and a daughter: Robert, Jonathan and Andrea.

The second wife, Susan, nee Weber, gave birth to two sons: Alexander and Gregory.

Bibliography

The Alchemy of Finance, reprinted several times, is considered a real bestseller. In this book, the financier reflected the essence of the theory of investment.

“The bubble of American superiority. Where American power should be directed" is an echo of the controversy with the White House.

Throughout his life, the financier and failed philosopher cherished the dream of realizing the ideas of his teacher Karl Popper. “Open society. Reforming Global Capitalism" is reflection and advocacy of ideas and the work of a lifetime.

On the night of August 12, 2012, George Soros celebrated his 82nd birthday with 40-year-old Tamiko Bolton. The fiancee of a prominent investor, who previously sold nutritional supplements online, now owns a company offering online yoga classes.

American financier, founder and head of charitable foundations George Soros (real name Gyorgy Shoros) was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest (Hungary) into a middle-income Jewish family. George's father was a lawyer and publisher. In 1914, he volunteered for the front, was captured by the Russians and was exiled to Siberia, from where he fled back to his native Budapest.

During World War II, thanks to false documents prepared by his father, the Soros family escaped persecution by the Nazis and emigrated to Great Britain in 1947. At this time, George Soros was already 17 years old. He entered the London School of Economics and successfully graduated after three years. During his studies, he was particularly influenced by the philosophy of Karl Popper and the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes.

In England, he found work in a haberdashery factory, where he began working as a salesman. Then he got a job as a traveling salesman, offering goods to various merchants at the seaside resorts of Wales. In 1953, Soros received a position at Singer and Friedlander. The work and at the same time the internship took place in the arbitration department, which was located next to the stock exchange. Its leader traded shares of gold mining companies.

In 1956, Soros arrived in the United States at the invitation of the father of his London friend, who had his own small brokerage firm on Wall Street. Soros' career in the United States began with international arbitrage, that is, buying securities in one country and selling them in another. After the Suez crisis, this type of business did not go as well as Soros wanted, and he created a new method of trading, calling it "internal arbitrage" (selling separately combined securities of stocks, bonds and warrants before they could be officially separated from each other). friend). Before President Kennedy introduced an additional tax on foreign investment, this type of activity brought Soros a good income. But after that everything went downhill, so he also had to leave this type of business.

From 1963 to 1966, Soros tried to rewrite the dissertation he began working on after business school, and returned to writing his treatise, The Heavy Burden of Consciousness, but was not satisfied with the result. This ended the career of Soros as a philosopher, and he returned to business.

In 1966, Soros created his first investment fund with a total capital of $4 million. Over the three years of the investment fund's existence, George Soros received significant profits. In 1969, Soros became the head of the Double Eagle Foundation, which later grew into the Quantum Group. By the mid-1990s, the fund's capital was already $10 billion.

On September 15, 1992, a day that went down in history as “Black Wednesday,” George Soros earned about a billion dollars. He undertook a number of operations that were associated with the rapid fall of the English pound. It was after this fraud that the nickname “The Man Who Collapsed the Bank of England” firmly stuck to Soros.

George Soros made all his money by short-selling. Soros' main tactic is the theory of reflexivity of stock markets. According to this tactic, all trading decisions are made by the speculator based on expectations of future prices.

Some experts believe that Soros owes his success to the gift of financial foresight. According to another version, Soros receives insider information from high-ranking intelligence, political and financial circles of the largest countries in the world. In 2002, he was found guilty by a Paris court of receiving confidential information and sentenced to a fine of 2.2 million euros. The court found that due to the fact that Soros owned confidential information, he was able to earn more than $2 million from shares of the French bank Societe Generale.

In 1979, George Soros became active in philanthropy. In New York, he founded his first foundation, the Open Society Foundation. That same year, he set up a fund to support black students at the University of Cape Town in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Soros's first Eastern European foundation was founded in Hungary in 1984.

In 1987, he launched an initiative to help open society in Russia. In addition to the foundations he founded throughout the former Soviet Union, Soros created the International Science Foundation (ISF) in 1992 to help scientists in Russia and the former Soviet bloc survive the difficult transition without stopping their research or emigrating to other countries. By distributing more than $115 million through the ISF, Soros played a significant role in reducing brain drain and preventing Russia's intellectual and scientific resources from being used for destructive purposes.

In 1990, on the initiative of Soros, the Central European University was founded in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw.

The network of philanthropic organizations founded by Soros operates in more than 50 countries around the world. Located primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States, these funds are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of open societies.
Every year, George Soros's network of foundations spends hundreds of millions of dollars to support certain categories of citizens and even entire states.

George Soros is the President and Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, a private investment management firm, and the general advisor to the Quantum Group of Funds, a number of international investment companies. In July 2000, Soros merged his flagship Quantum Fund with the Quantum Emerging Growth Fund to form the Quantum Endowment Fund.

Soros is known not only as a financier and philanthropist, but also as a social thinker, for whom the establishment of an open society in the post-communist world is a fundamental value and central idea.

In addition to numerous articles, he wrote a number of books, including “The Alchemy of Finance” (1987), “Discovering the Soviet System” (1990), “Supporting Democracy” (1991), “Guaranteeing Democracy” (1991), “Soros on Soros” ( 1995, Russian translation, 1997), "George Soros on globalization" (2002); "The Bubble of American Supremacy" (2005); "A New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The 2008 Credit Crisis and Its Implications" (2009); "Financial Crisis in Europe and the United States" (2012).

His articles and essays on politics, society and economics are regularly published in national press and magazines around the world.
Soros actively interferes in politics. In addition to participating in US public life, he supported the opposition in Georgia, Ukraine and a number of other countries.

George Soros has received honorary degrees from the New School for Social Research, the University of Oxford, the University of Economics in Budapest, and Yale University. In 1995, the University of Bologna awarded Soros its highest honor, the Laurea Honoris Causa, in recognition of his efforts to support open societies around the world.

George Soros has been married twice. He divorced his first wife, Annalize Witshak, in 1983 after 23 years of marriage. That same year, he married Susan Weber, an art critic from New York who was 25 years younger than the businessman. The couple spent 22 years together. George Soros has five children from two marriages. In 2011, his second son Jonathan left his father's investment fund and opened his own company.

For more than five years, the financier's companion was the Brazilian TV star Adriana Ferreira.

In August 2011, she sued the billionaire. She accused Soros of breaking promises and violence.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

A look that is scary to meet, full of despair and pain.

The look of a man going to death, who has not a drop of hope for salvation. The look of a man following in a column of doomed Jews, along the road from life to non-existence... The Holocaust claimed the lives of millions of people, and the list of victims could be replenished with another name - the name of Djord Schwartz.

Now this man is not called anything other than George Soros, but from childhood he learned the main lesson, thanks to which he did not share the fate of those affected by Nazi repression:

“I did not accept the rules proposed by others. If I did that, I wouldn’t be alive anymore.”

Our today's hero was born in Budapest in 1930. And if he owes his birth to both parents, then for his second birth he must thank his father. He forged documents and took his family to Great Britain when the threat from the Nazis solving the “Jewish question” loomed over them.

“I was lucky that my father was one of those who did not act as people usually do,” Soros, who escaped unknown death during the genocide, is convinced.


Well, the ability to make risky decisions helped George Soros reach certain heights; he has all the signs of a successful person. Judge for yourself - our hero ranks 7th position in the list of American billionaires, his fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $20 billion as of March 2012.

Mr. Soros is an influential investor, financial guru, founder of charities in 25 countries and father of five children.

George Soros is also the man who "broke the Bank of England", a proponent of the legalization of marijuana, a master of market speculation, and a sponsor of various opposition groups in various countries around the world.

You already understand that before us is a very multifaceted personality. You can admire George Soros, but you can also hate him, you can praise him, but you can also scold him. I prefer another option - to study. Learn both from the good and strong qualities of his personality, and from his mistakes, because it’s better to learn from the mistakes of others than your own, isn’t it?

Soros himself does not at all claim to be an ideal person, and values ​​the ability to admit that he is wrong:


In 2012, Soros will turn 82 years old, and now we will talk about what he did to earn all the flattering and not so flattering reviews about himself.

After emigrating to Great Britain in 1947, Soros entered the London School of Economics and Political Science. The educational institution was famous for its influential graduates, including John Kennedy himself. The school’s motto – “know the reason for things” – was also accepted by George Soros, and now his life philosophy “is based not on money, but on my understanding of the complex relationship between reality and ideas about it.”

During his studies, Soros met Karl Popper, an outstanding philosopher and sociologist. The Austrian lecturer became a mentor for George Soros, infecting him with his concept of an “open society.” According to Mr. Popper, members of an open society make decisions based on critical thinking and their own intelligence, while in a closed society, relationships between people are regulated by a system of taboos.

Well, thinking with your own head, not agreeing to play the role of a cog in society, is the lot of successful people. Mr. Soros is convinced that if you apply intelligence to business, which is “not that difficult at all,” "smart people can get real wealth when they really dedicate themselves to it».

After successfully completing his education, Soros gets a job as an assistant manager at a haberdashery factory. At one time he worked as a traveling salesman, driving around the seaside resorts of England in an old Ford. If Soros had a work book, one could read the following entries: “waiter in a restaurant,” “porter at a train station,” “apple picker.”

Was such a position really suitable for an ambitious young man?

Not at all. It’s just that in the 50s of the last century, Soros was faced with what a modern person has to deal with when applying for jobs - discrimination. George persistently proposes his candidacy in the banking industry, but everywhere he hears refusal due to nationality and lack of patrons.

But this does not stop Soros. If a person sets a goal for himself and persistently pursues it, sooner or later he will achieve it. In 1953, George received a position at the London company Singer & Friedlander. Soros works in the arbitration department, but when the work has become a boring routine, Soros is looking for new options.

In 1956, at the invitation of his friend’s father (oh, dating, after all, it wouldn’t hurt) he moved to America. At a Wall Street brokerage firm, Soros learns the ins and outs of buying and selling. Buying in one country and selling them in another, or, to use the terminology, “external arbitrage,” brought our hero a good income. Enterprising George even comes up with his own trading method - he sells the combined securities separately before they can be officially separated from each other. Soros dubbed this method of earning “internal arbitrage.”


In this regard, I remember the comedy “Men in Black”, when the main character of Will Smith creaksly moves the table towards him to make it more convenient to fill out the form. Yes, people who change the rules of the game are capable of not only moving tables, but also moving the economies of countries, as our hero will soon convince you of.

In 1963, when domestic arbitration stopped making money due to government-imposed fees, Soros returned to work on his dissertation, which he had begun earlier. In 1966, without having completed his scientific work on the topic “The Heavy Burden of Consciousness,” our philosopher returned to. It is in this field that Mr. Soros proves that consciousness is a completely feasible burden that brings good income.

In 1970, Soros, together with Jim Rogers, founded the famous Quantum hedge fund, which became one of the main sources of his income. With respect to readers who are not familiar with the term “”, I will provide a short reference. Hedge funds are private investment funds that are not available to the general public and are managed by a professional investment manager.

George Soros was not the only “culprit” of the pound sterling, but it was he who received the title of “the man who broke the Bank of England.” Since then, this environment has become monochrome - it went down in history as “black”, and Soros himself calls it “white”.

On the night of August 12, 2012, George Soros celebrated his 82nd birthday with 40-year-old Tamiko Bolton. The fiancee of a prominent investor, who previously sold nutritional supplements online, now owns a company offering online yoga classes.

American financier, founder and head of charitable foundations George Soros (real name Gyorgy Shoros) was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest (Hungary) into a middle-income Jewish family. George's father was a lawyer and publisher. In 1914, he volunteered for the front, was captured by the Russians and was exiled to Siberia, from where he fled back to his native Budapest.

During World War II, thanks to false documents prepared by his father, the Soros family escaped persecution by the Nazis and emigrated to Great Britain in 1947. At this time, George Soros was already 17 years old. He entered the London School of Economics and successfully graduated after three years. During his studies, he was particularly influenced by the philosophy of Karl Popper and the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes.

In England, he found work in a haberdashery factory, where he began working as a salesman. Then he got a job as a traveling salesman, offering goods to various merchants at the seaside resorts of Wales. In 1953, Soros received a position at Singer and Friedlander. The work and at the same time the internship took place in the arbitration department, which was located next to the stock exchange. Its leader traded shares of gold mining companies.

In 1956, Soros arrived in the United States at the invitation of the father of his London friend, who had his own small brokerage firm on Wall Street. Soros' career in the United States began with international arbitrage, that is, buying securities in one country and selling them in another. After the Suez crisis, this type of business did not go as well as Soros wanted, and he created a new method of trading, calling it "internal arbitrage" (selling separately combined securities of stocks, bonds and warrants before they could be officially separated from each other). friend). Before President Kennedy introduced an additional tax on foreign investment, this type of activity brought Soros a good income. But after that everything went downhill, so he also had to leave this type of business.

From 1963 to 1966, Soros tried to rewrite the dissertation he began working on after business school, and returned to writing his treatise, The Heavy Burden of Consciousness, but was not satisfied with the result. This ended the career of Soros as a philosopher, and he returned to business.

In 1966, Soros created his first investment fund with a total capital of $4 million. Over the three years of the investment fund's existence, George Soros received significant profits. In 1969, Soros became the head of the Double Eagle Foundation, which later grew into the Quantum Group. By the mid-1990s, the fund's capital was already $10 billion.

On September 15, 1992, a day that went down in history as “Black Wednesday,” George Soros earned about a billion dollars. He undertook a number of operations that were associated with the rapid fall of the English pound. It was after this fraud that the nickname “The Man Who Collapsed the Bank of England” firmly stuck to Soros.

George Soros made all his money by short-selling. Soros' main tactic is the theory of reflexivity of stock markets. According to this tactic, all trading decisions are made by the speculator based on expectations of future prices.

Some experts believe that Soros owes his success to the gift of financial foresight. According to another version, Soros receives insider information from high-ranking intelligence, political and financial circles of the largest countries in the world. In 2002, he was found guilty by a Paris court of receiving confidential information and sentenced to a fine of 2.2 million euros. The court found that due to the fact that Soros owned confidential information, he was able to earn more than $2 million from shares of the French bank Societe Generale.

In 1979, George Soros became active in philanthropy. In New York, he founded his first foundation, the Open Society Foundation. That same year, he set up a fund to support black students at the University of Cape Town in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Soros's first Eastern European foundation was founded in Hungary in 1984.

In 1987, he launched an initiative to help open society in Russia. In addition to the foundations he founded throughout the former Soviet Union, Soros created the International Science Foundation (ISF) in 1992 to help scientists in Russia and the former Soviet bloc survive the difficult transition without stopping their research or emigrating to other countries. By distributing more than $115 million through the ISF, Soros played a significant role in reducing brain drain and preventing Russia's intellectual and scientific resources from being used for destructive purposes.

In 1990, on the initiative of Soros, the Central European University was founded in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw.

The network of philanthropic organizations founded by Soros operates in more than 50 countries around the world. Located primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States, these funds are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of open societies.
Every year, George Soros's network of foundations spends hundreds of millions of dollars to support certain categories of citizens and even entire states.

George Soros is the President and Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, a private investment management firm, and the general advisor to the Quantum Group of Funds, a number of international investment companies. In July 2000, Soros merged his flagship Quantum Fund with the Quantum Emerging Growth Fund to form the Quantum Endowment Fund.

Soros is known not only as a financier and philanthropist, but also as a social thinker, for whom the establishment of an open society in the post-communist world is a fundamental value and central idea.

In addition to numerous articles, he wrote a number of books, including “The Alchemy of Finance” (1987), “Discovering the Soviet System” (1990), “Supporting Democracy” (1991), “Guaranteeing Democracy” (1991), “Soros on Soros” ( 1995, Russian translation, 1997), "George Soros on globalization" (2002); "The Bubble of American Supremacy" (2005); "A New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The 2008 Credit Crisis and Its Implications" (2009); "Financial Crisis in Europe and the United States" (2012).

His articles and essays on politics, society and economics are regularly published in national press and magazines around the world.
Soros actively interferes in politics. In addition to participating in US public life, he supported the opposition in Georgia, Ukraine and a number of other countries.

George Soros has received honorary degrees from the New School for Social Research, the University of Oxford, the University of Economics in Budapest, and Yale University. In 1995, the University of Bologna awarded Soros its highest honor, the Laurea Honoris Causa, in recognition of his efforts to support open societies around the world.

George Soros has been married twice. He divorced his first wife, Annalize Witshak, in 1983 after 23 years of marriage. That same year, he married Susan Weber, an art critic from New York who was 25 years younger than the businessman. The couple spent 22 years together. George Soros has five children from two marriages. In 2011, his second son Jonathan left his father's investment fund and opened his own company.

For more than five years, the financier's companion was the Brazilian TV star Adriana Ferreira.

In August 2011, she sued the billionaire. She accused Soros of breaking promises and violence.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources