George Soros

George Soros (born Schwartz György; August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian and American investor and philanthropist. As of September 2026, he had a net worth of US$8.6 billion. Soros has donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations. In 2020, Forbes called Soros the "most generous giver" in terms of percentage of net worth.

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family, Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a teenager and moved to the United Kingdom in 1947. He studied at the London School of Economics and was awarded a BSc in philosophy in 1951, and then a Master of Science degree, also in philosophy, in 1954. 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 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 for capital markets, to provide insights into asset bubbles and fundamental/market value of securities, as well as value discrepancies used for shorting and swapping stocks.

Soros supports progressive and liberal political causes, to which he dispenses donations through the Open Society Foundations. Between 1979 and 2011, he donated more than $11 billion to various philanthropic causes; by 2017, his donations "on civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world" totaled $12 billion. His influence and activities helped set off the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and provided one of Europe's largest higher education endowments to the Central European University in his Hungarian hometown. Soros's extensive funding of political causes has made him a "bugaboo of European nationalists". Numerous far-right theorists have promoted claims that characterize Soros as a dangerous "puppet master" behind alleged global plots. These portrayals of Soros, a Holocaust survivor, have been denounced as antisemitic conspiracy theories. In 2018, The New York Times reported that "conspiracy theories about him have gone mainstream, to nearly every corner of the Republican Party".

György Schwartz was born on 12 August 1930 in Budapest in the Kingdom of Hungary to a prosperous non-observant Jewish family. Soros has wryly described his home as antisemitic. The family of his mother Erzsébet (also known as Elizabeth) operated a successful silk store. His father Tivadar (also known as Teodoro Ŝvarc) was a lawyer and a well-known Esperanto author who edited the Esperanto literary magazine Literatura Mondo and raised his son to speak the language. Tivadar had also been a prisoner of war during and after World War I until he escaped from Russia and rejoined his family in Budapest.

Soros's parents married in 1924. In 1936, Soros's family changed their name from the German-Jewish "Schwartz" to "Soros", as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary. Tivadar liked the new name because it is a palindrome and because of its meaning. In Hungarian, soros means "next"; in Esperanto it means "will soar".

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. Soros later described this time to writer Michael Lewis:

The Jewish Council asked the little kids to hand out the deportation notices. I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper ... I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, "You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported". I'm not sure to what extent he knew they were going to be gassed. I did what my father said.

Soros did not return to that job; his family survived the war by purchasing documents to say that they were Christians. Later that year at age 14, Soros posed as the Christian godson of an official of the collaborationist Hungarian government's Ministry of Agriculture, who himself had a Jewish wife in hiding. On one occasion, rather than leave the 14-year-old alone, the official took Soros with him while completing an inventory of a Jewish family's confiscated estate. Tivadar saved not only his immediate family, but also many other Hungarian Jews, and Soros later wrote that 1944 had been "the happiest [year] of his life", for it had given him the opportunity to witness his father's heroism. In 1945, Soros survived the Siege of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city. George and his mother also spent some time hiding with the family of Elza Brandeisz and even attended their Lutheran church with them. When he was 17, Soros relocated to Paris before eventually moving to England. There he became a student at the London School of Economics. While a student of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter, and once received £40 from a Quaker charity. Soros would sometimes stand at Speakers' Corner lecturing about the virtues of internationalism in Esperanto, which he had learned from his father. Soros obtained his Bachelor of Science in philosophy in 1951 and a Master of Science in philosophy in 1954 from the London School of Economics. After graduating, he wanted to stay in the university and work as a professor, but his grades were not high enough, prompting him to work for an investment firm in London.

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."

In 1954, Soros began his financial career at the merchant bank Singer & Friedlander of London. He worked as a clerk and later moved to the arbitrage department. A fellow employee, Robert Mayer, suggested he apply at his father's brokerage house, F.M. Mayer of New York.

In 1956, Soros moved to New York City, where he worked as an arbitrage trader for F. M. Mayer (1956–59). He specialized in European stocks, which were becoming popular with U.S. institutional investors following the formation of the Coal and Steel Community, which later became the Common Market.

In 1959, after three years at F. M. Mayer, Soros moved to Wertheim & Co. He planned to stay for five years, enough time to save $500,000, after which he intended to return to England to study philosophy. He worked as an analyst of European securities until 1963.

During this period, Soros developed the theory of reflexivity to extend the ideas of his tutor at the London School of Economics, Karl Popper. 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, in contrast to the equilibrium predictions of more standard neoclassical economics.

Until the 2004 presidential election, Soros had not been a large donor to U.S. political campaigns. According to OpenSecrets, during the 2003–2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups (tax-exempt groups under the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527). The groups aimed to defeat President George W. Bush. After Bush's reelection, Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.

In August 2009, Soros donated $35 million to the state of New York to be earmarked for underprivileged children and given to parents who had benefit cards at the rate of $200 per child aged 3 through 17, with no limit as to the number of children that qualified. An additional $140 million was put into the fund by the state of New York from money they had received from the 2009 federal recovery act. Soros was an initial donor to the Center for American Progress, and he continues to support the organization through the Open Society Foundations.

In October 2011, a Reuters story, "Soros: not a funder of Wall Street Protests", was published after several commentators pointed out errors in an earlier Reuters story headlined "Who's Behind the Wall St. Protests?" with a lead stating that the Occupy Wall Street movement "may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men [Soros]". Reuters's follow-up article also reported a Soros spokesman and Adbusters' co-founder Kalle Lasn both saying that Adbusters—the reputed catalyst for the first Occupy Wall Street protests—had never received any contributions from Soros, contrary to Reuters's earlier story that reported that "indirect financial links" existed between the two as late as 2010.

On September 27, 2012, Soros announced that he was donating $1 million to the super PAC backing President Barack Obama's reelection Priorities USA Action. In October 2013, Soros donated $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, becoming a co-chairman of the super PAC's national finance committee. In June 2015, he donated $1 million to the Super PAC Priorities USA Action, which supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. He donated $6 million to the PAC in December 2015 and $2.5 million in August 2016. Soros launched a new super PAC called Democracy PAC for the 2020 election cycle. By July 2019, he had donated $5.1 million to it.

Since 2016, Soros has been donating sums exceeding $1 million to the campaigns of progressive criminal justice reform proponents through the Safety and Justice PAC in local district attorney elections. In many districts, such large contributions were unprecedented and the campaigning strategy was "turned on its head" with a focus on incarceration, police misconduct and bail system, according to the Los Angeles Times. Larry Krasner was elected as the District Attorney of Philadelphia with the help of a $1.5 million ad campaign funded by Soros in 2017. Soros was the largest donor supporting the campaign of George Gascón for Los Angeles County District Attorney in 2020, contributing $2.25 million to superPACs in Gascón's favor. Soros gave $2 million to a PAC supporting Kim Foxx's campaign for Cook County State's Attorney in 2020.

Because of his Jewish identity, wealth, and philanthropy, Soros has been described as "the perfect code word" for conspiracy theories that unite antisemitism and Islamophobia. One prominent Soros-related conspiracy theory is that he is behind the 2015 European migrant crisis or importing migrants to European countries. The Hungarian government spent millions of dollars on a poster campaign demonizing Soros. According to anthropologist Ivan Kalmar, "Many of his most outspoken enemies inside and outside Hungary saw him as leading an international cabal that included other Jews such as the Rothschilds, as well as Freemasons and Illuminati".

A pipe bomb was placed in the mailbox at Soros's home in Katonah, New York, on October 22, 2018, as part of the October 2018 United States mail bombing attempts. The package was discovered by a caretaker, who removed it and notified authorities. It was photographed and exploded by the FBI, which launched an investigation. For several days afterward, similar bombs were mailed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democrats and liberals.

On October 26, 2018, Cesar Sayoc Jr. was arrested in Aventura, Florida, on suspicion of mailing the bombs. In August 2019, Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison for mailing 16 pipe bombs to 13 victims. None of the devices exploded.

Soros's writings focus heavily on the concept of reflexivity, where the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the fundamentals of the economy. Soros argues that different principles apply in markets depending on whether they are in a "near to equilibrium" or a "far from equilibrium" state. He argues that, when markets are rising or falling rapidly, they are typically marked by disequilibrium rather than equilibrium, and that the conventional economic theory of the market (the "efficient market hypothesis") does not apply in these situations. Soros has popularized the concepts of dynamic disequilibrium, static disequilibrium, and near-equilibrium conditions. He has stated that his own financial success has been attributable to the edge accorded by his understanding of the action of the reflexive effect. Reflexivity is based on three main ideas:

Reflexivity is best observed under special conditions where investor bias grows and spreads throughout the investment arena. Examples of factors that may give rise to this bias include (a) equity leveraging or (b) the trend-following habits of speculators.

Reflexivity appears intermittently since it is most likely to be revealed under certain conditions; i.e., the character of the equilibrium process is best considered in terms of probabilities.

Investors' observation of and participation in the capital markets may at times influence valuations and fundamental conditions or outcomes.

A recent example (circa 2008) of reflexivity in modern financial markets is that of the debt and equity of housing markets. Lenders began to make more money available to more people in the 1990s to buy houses. More people bought houses with this larger amount of money, thus increasing the prices of these houses. Lenders looked at their balance sheets, which not only showed that they had made more loans, but that the collaterals backing the loans – the value of the houses – had gone up (because more money was chasing the same amount of housing, relatively). Thus they lent out more money because their balance sheets looked good, and prices rose higher still.

As of March 2020, Forbes magazine listed Soros as the 162nd richest person in the world, with a net worth of $8.3 billion. He has also donated 64% of his original fortune, of which more than $15 billion has been distributed through his Open Society Foundations (an international grant making network that supports advancing justice, education, public health and independent media). Forbes has called him the most generous giver (when measured as a percentage of net worth).

In September 2020, Forbes deputy wealth editor Jennifer Wang awarded Soros a perfect philanthropy score of 5, the highest possible rating; placing him among an exclusive group of just ten Forbes 400 members, alongside Warren Buffett, John Arnold, Eli Broad, and others who have each given away at least 20% of their fortune.

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.

In February 1994, Herb Sturz was asked by Aryeh Neier (then president of Open Society Institute) and Soros to help improve housing in post-apartheid South Africa. In 1995, the National Urban and Reconstruction and Housing Agency (NURCHA) was created as a joint venture between the South African Government and the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF). Both groups contributed $5 million for operating expenses. The effort had a slow start due to South African banking resistance. Then Soros pledged $50 million in loan guarantees, conditional to an additional $250 million being raised across the world from other contributors. By 2001, NURCHA had built 70,000 homes and by 2007 had built 200,000 homes. Almost all of the loans to builders, who were black South Africans, were repaid. After more than two decades, NURCHA was still operating and 100% managed by the state of South Africa.

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.

Soros has been married three times and divorced twice. In 1960, he married Annaliese Witschak (1934–2025). 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.