George Soros facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
George Soros
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Soros in 2018
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| Born |
György Schwartz
August 12, 1930 Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary
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| Citizenship | Hungary United States |
| Education | London School of Economics (BSc, MSc) |
| Occupation | Investor, hedge fund manager, author, philanthropist |
| Known for |
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| Spouse(s) |
Annaliese Witschak
(m. 1960; div. 1983)Susan Weber
(m. 1983; div. 2005)Tamiko Bolton
(m. 2013) |
| Children | 5, including Robert, Jonathan and Alexander |
| Parent(s) |
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| Relatives | Paul Soros (brother) |
George Soros (born György Schwartz on August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian-American businessman, investor, and philanthropist.
Contents
Early life and education
Soros was born in Budapest in the Kingdom of Hungary to a prosperous Jewish family. His mother Erzsébet (also known as Elizabeth) came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro Ŝvarc) was a lawyer. In 1936, Soros's family changed their name from the German-Jewish Schwartz to Soros, as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary.
Soros was 13 years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. The Nazis barred Jewish children from attending school, and Soros and the other schoolchildren were made to report to the Judenrat ("Jewish Council"), which had been established during the occupation.
His family survived the war by purchasing documents to say that they were Christians. In 1945, Soros survived the Siege of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city.
In 1947, Soros moved to England and became a student at the London School of Economics. He graduated as a Bachelor of Science in philosophy in 1951, and a Master of Science in philosophy in 1954.
Investment career
In a discussion at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in 2006, Alvin Shuster, former foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, asked Soros, "How does one go from an immigrant to a financier? ... When did you realize that you knew how to make money?". Soros replied, "Well, I had a variety of jobs and I ended up selling fancy goods on the seaside, souvenir shops, and I thought, that's really not what I was cut out to do. So, I wrote to every managing director in every merchant bank in London, got just one or two replies, and eventually that's how I got a job in a merchant bank."
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Soros started his career working in British and American merchant banks, before setting up his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969. Profits from this fund provided the seed money for Soros Fund Management, his second hedge fund, in 1970. Double Eagle was renamed Quantum Fund and was the principal firm Soros advised. At its founding, Quantum Fund had $12 million in assets under management, and as of 2011[update] it had $25 billion, the majority of Soros's overall net worth.
Soros is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" as a result of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion, during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.
Based on his early studies of philosophy, Soros formulated the General Theory of Reflexivity. Reflexivity posits that market values are often driven by the fallible ideas of participants, not only by the economic fundamentals of the situation. Ideas and events influence each other in reflexive feedback loops. Soros argued that this process leads to markets having procyclical "virtuous" or "vicious" cycles of boom and bust.
Wealth and philanthropy
Soros has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa, and began funding dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain.
Soros's philanthropic funding includes efforts to promote non-violent democratization in the post-communist states. These efforts, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, occur primarily through the Open Society Foundations (originally Open Society Institute or OSI) and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names (such as the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland). As of 2003, PBS estimated that he had given away a total of $4 billion. The OSI says it has spent about $500 million annually in recent years.
Time magazine in 2007 cited two specific projects—$100 million toward Internet infrastructure for regional Russian universities, and $50 million for the Millennium Promise to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa—noting that Soros had given $742 million to projects in the U.S., and given away a total of more than $7 billion.
Other notable projects have included aid to scientists and universities throughout central and eastern Europe, help to civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and Transparency International. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University (CEU).
In September 2006, Soros pledged $50 million to the Millennium Promise, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs to provide educational, agricultural, and medical aid to help villages in Africa enduring poverty. The New York Times termed this endeavor a "departure" for Soros whose philanthropic focus had been on fostering democracy and good government, but Soros noted that most poverty resulted from bad governance.
In May 2011, Soros donated $60 million to Bard College, establishing the Bard College Center for Civic Engagement.
Soros played a role in the peaceful transition from communism to democracy in Hungary (1984–89) and provided a substantial endowment to Central European University in Budapest. The Open Society Foundations has active programs in more than 60 countries around the world with total expenditures currently averaging approximately $600 million a year.
On October 17, 2017, it was announced that Soros had transferred $18 billion to the Open Society Foundations.
In October 2018, Soros donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation via the Wikimedia Endowment program.
In January 2020, Soros announced a $1 billion endowment donation at the World Economic Forum, establishing the Open Society University Network a global network of educational institutions in partnership with Bard College and the Central European University. Bard College president Leon Botstein serves as chancellor of the Open Society University Network.
In July 2020, Soros's Foundations announced plans to give $220 million in grants for racial justice groups, criminal justice reform and civic engagement.
In July 2020, Soros donated $100 million to Bard College, to strengthen and expand Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement initiatives, and its leadership role as a founding partner of the Open Society University Network.
In April 2021, Soros pledged $500 million to the endowment of Bard College. The donation sits among the largest ever made to higher education in the United States. Following the $500 million donation Soros donated $25 million to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in August 2021, as well as an additional $25 million dollar donation to Bard in September 2022.
Personal life
Soros has been married three times and divorced twice. In 1960, he married Annaliese Witschak (born January 3, 1934). Annaliese was an ethnic German immigrant, who had been orphaned during the war. Although she was not Jewish, she was well-liked by Soros's parents, as she had also experienced the privation and displacement brought about by World War II. They divorced in 1983. They had three children:
- Robert Daniel Soros (born 1963): The founder of the Central European University in Budapest, as well as a network of foundations in Eastern Europe. In 1992, he married Melissa Robin Schiff at the Temple Emanu-El in New York City. The Rabbi Dr. David Posner officiated the ceremony.
- Andrea Soros Colombel (born June 11, 1965): The founder and president of Trace Foundation, established in 1993 to promote the cultural continuity and sustainable development of Tibetan communities within China. She is also a founding partner and member of the board of directors of the Acumen Fund, a global venture fund that employs an entrepreneurial approach in addressing the problems of global poverty She is married to Eric Colombel (born October 26, 1963).
- Jonathan Tivadar Soros (born September 10, 1970): A hedge fund manager and political donor. In 2012, he co-founded Friends of Democracy, a super PAC dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics. In 1997, he married Jennifer Ann Allan (born November 26, 1969).
In 1983, George Soros married Susan Weber. They divorced in 2005. They have two children:
- Alexander Soros (born 1985): Alexander has gained prominence for his donations to social and political causes, focusing his philanthropic efforts on "progressive causes that might not have widespread support." Alexander led the list of student political donors in the 2010 election cycle.
- Gregory James Soros (born 1988), artist.
In 2008, Soros met Tamiko Bolton; they married on September 21, 2013. His older brother, Paul Soros, a private investor and philanthropist, died on June 15, 2013. As of 2022[update], Soros owned homes on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, in The Hamptons on Long Island, and in Katonah, New York, within Westchester County.
Honors and awards
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.
In 2008, Soros was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame.
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.
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".
In April 2019, Soros was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Courage.
Interesting facts about George Soros
- Soros's father was a well-known Esperanto-speaker who raised his son to speak the language.
- In Hungarian, soros means "next in line," or "designated successor"; in Esperanto it means "will soar."
- While a student, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter.
- As of October 2023[update], he had a net worth of US$6.7 billion.
- Soros is known as the most generous giver (when measured as a percentage of net worth), having donated 64% of his original fortune.
George Soros quotes
- "The main difference between me and other people who have amassed this kind of money is that I am primarily interested in ideas, and I don't have much personal use for money."
- "Discount the obvious, bet on the unexpected"
- "The hardest thing to judge is what level of risk is safe."
- "If investing is entertaining, if you're having fun, you're probably not making any money. Good investing is boring."
- "It's more difficult, you know, to bring about positive change than it is to make money. "
See also
In Spanish: George Soros para niños
- Forbes 400
- Alexander Soros
- Jonathan Soros
- Open Society Foundations
- Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
- Scott Bessent, former chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management
- Tides Foundation
