George Soros

George Soros is a Hungarian-born American investor and philanthropist, born in Budapest in 1930 and educated in philosophy at the London School of Economics. He worked in British and American merchant banks and brokerage houses before setting up his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969, and in 1970 he founded Soros Fund Management and became its chairman. The fund Double Eagle became the Quantum Fund, the main vehicle he advised. He is best known for the 1992 short sale of pounds sterling during the Black Wednesday currency crisis, a trade that earned a reported profit of about one billion dollars and gave him the nickname The Man Who Broke the Bank of England. From his philosophical training under Karl Popper he developed a theory of reflexivity to describe how participants biases feed back into market prices. He has directed a large share of his fortune to the Open Society Foundations. His political giving is contested, and some portrayals of him are described by the source as antisemitic conspiracy theories.