117 Facts About George Soros

George Soros studied at the London School of Economics and was awarded a BSc in philosophy in 1951, and then a Master of Science degree, in philosophy, in 1954.

George Soros started his career working in British and American merchant banks, before setting up his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969.

George Soros influenced 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.

Conspiracy theories targeting George Soros, who is of Jewish descent, have often been called antisemitic.

George Soros was born in Budapest in the Kingdom of Hungary to a prosperous non-observant Jewish family, who, like many upper-middle class Hungarian Jews at the time, were uncomfortable with their roots.

George Soros has wryly described his home as a Jewish antisemitic home.

George Soros's father Tivadar 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.

In 1936, George Soros's family changed their name from the German-Jewish "Schwartz" to "George Soros", as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary.

George Soros was 13 years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary.

George Soros said, 'You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported'.

George 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, George 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.

Tivadar saved not only his immediate family but many other Hungarian Jews, and George 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, George Soros survived the Siege of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city.

When he was 17, George Soros relocated to Paris before eventually moving to England.

George 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.

George Soros worked as a clerk and later moved to the arbitrage department.

George Soros specialized in European stocks, which were becoming popular with US institutional investors following the formation of the Coal and Steel Community, which later became the Common Market.

George Soros planned to stay for five years, enough time to save $500,000, after which he intended to return to England to study philosophy.

George Soros worked as an analyst of European securities until 1963.

George 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.

George Soros spent the years from 1963 to 1966 with his main focus on the revision of his philosophy dissertation.

In 1969, George Soros set up the Double Eagle hedge fund with $4m of investors' capital including $250,000 of his own money.

In 1970, George Soros founded George Soros Fund Management and became its chairman.

In 1973, due to perceived conflicts of interest limiting his ability to run the two funds, George Soros resigned from the management of the Double Eagle Fund.

George Soros then established the Soros Fund and gave investors in the Double Eagle Fund the option of transferring to that or staying with Arnhold and S Bleichroeder.

George Soros had been building a huge short position in pounds sterling for months leading up to the Black Wednesday of September 1992.

George Soros had recognized the unfavorable position of the United Kingdom in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

George Soros was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England".

Stanley Druckenmiller, who traded under George Soros, originally saw the weakness in the pound and stated: "[George Soros's] contribution was pushing him to take a gigantic position".

George Soros was believed to have traded billions of Finnish markkas on February 5,1996, in anticipation of selling them short.

In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, accused George Soros of using the wealth under his control to punish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for welcoming Myanmar as a member.

In 1998's The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, George Soros explained his role in the crisis as follows:.

In 1988, Soros was contacted by a French financier named Georges Pebereau, who asked him to participate in an effort to assemble a group of investors to purchase a large number of shares in Societe Generale, a leading French bank that was part of a privatization program.

George Soros eventually decided against participating in the group effort, opting to personally move forward with his strategy of accumulating shares in four French companies: Societe Generale, as well as Suez, Paribas, and the Compagnie Generale d'Electricite.

George Soros had received no information from the Societe Generale and had no insider knowledge of the business, but he did possess knowledge that a group of investors was planning a takeover attempt.

George Soros denied any wrongdoing, saying news of the takeover was public knowledge and it was documented that his intent to acquire shares of the company predated his own awareness of the takeover.

Until the 2004 presidential election, George Soros had not been a large donor to US political campaigns.

George 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 2013, George Soros donated $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, becoming a co-chairman of the super PAC's national finance committee.

George Soros launched a new super PAC called Democracy PAC for the 2020 election cycle.

George Soros gave $2 million to a PAC supporting Kim Foxx's campaign for Cook County State's Attorney in 2020.

George Soros donated $128.5 million to support the Democratic Party in the election cycle.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, George Soros's funding has played an important role in the newly independent countries.

Former Georgian foreign minister Salome Zourabichvili wrote that institutions like the George Soros Foundation were the cradle of democratization and that all the NGOs that gravitated around the George Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution.

George Soros opines that after the revolution the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.

Some George Soros-backed pro-democracy initiatives have been banned in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

George Soros called the fines part of a campaign to "destroy independent society".

The government has attacked OSF, the international civil support foundation created by George Soros, and tried to revoke the licence of Central European University.

In January 2017, the "Stop Operation George Soros" initiative was launched in Macedonia.

SOS seeks to present "questions and answers about the way George Soros operates worldwide" and invites citizens to contribute to the research.

In November 2005, George Soros said: "My personal opinion is there's no alternative but to give Kosovo independence".

George Soros has helped fund the non-profit group Independent Diplomat, established by the former British diplomat Carne Ross.

George Soros has funded worldwide efforts to promote drug policy reform.

George Soros has funded similar measures in California, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada and Maine.

In 1994, George Soros delivered a speech in which he reported that he had offered to help his mother, a member of the right-to-die advocacy organization Hemlock Society, commit suicide.

One prominent George Soros-related conspiracy theory is that he is behind the European migrant crisis or importing migrants to European countries.

George 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.

George Soros argues that different principles apply in markets depending on whether they are in a "near to equilibrium" or a "far from equilibrium" state.

George Soros 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 does not apply in these situations.

George Soros has popularized the concepts of dynamic disequilibrium, static disequilibrium, and near-equilibrium conditions.

George Soros has stated that his own financial success has been attributable to the edge accorded by his understanding of the action of the reflexive effect.

George Soros's theories were originally dismissed by economists, but have received more attention after the 2008 crash including becoming the focus of an issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.

The notion of reflexivity provides an explanation of the theories of complexity economics, as developed at the Santa Fe Institute, although George Soros had not publicized his views at the time the discipline was originally developed there in the 1980s.

George Soros has stated that whereas the greatest threats to the "open society" in the past were from communism and fascism, the largest current threat is from market fundamentalism.

George Soros has suggested that the contemporary domination of world politics and world trade by the United States is a reflexive phenomenon, insofar as the success of military and financial coercion feeds back to encourage increasingly intense applications of the same policies to the point where they will eventually become unsustainable.

George Soros argues that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries.

George Soros blames many of the world's problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism.

George Soros ascribes his own success to being able to recognize when his predictions are wrong.

In February 2009, George Soros said the world financial system had in effect disintegrated, adding that there was no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

In January 2016, at an economic forum in Sri Lanka, George Soros predicted a financial crisis akin to 2008 based on the state of the global currency, stock and commodity markets as well as the sinking Chinese yuan.

George Soros has funded NGOs which have been actively critical of Israeli policies including groups that campaign for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

George Soros, citing accusations that he was one of the "Jewish financiers" who, in antisemitic terms, "ruled the world by proxy", suggested that, if the direction of those policies were changed, then anti-Semitism would diminish.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League later said that George Soros's comments held a simplistic view, were counterproductive, biased and a bigoted perception of the situation, and "blamed the victim" when holding Jews responsible for antisemitism.

George Soros has said that Jews can overcome antisemitism by "giv[ing] up on the tribalness".

In 2017, Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz filed a $10-million lawsuit against George Soros, alleging that George Soros had influenced the government of Guinea to freeze Steinmetz's company BSG Resources out of iron ore mining contracts in the African country due to "long-standing animus toward the state of Israel".

Steinmetz claims that George Soros engaged in a "smear" campaign against him and his companies and blames George Soros for scrutiny of him by American, Israeli, Swiss, and Guinean authorities.

George Soros called Steinmetz's suit "frivolous and entirely false" and said that it was "a desperate PR stunt meant to deflect attention from BSGR's mounting legal problems across multiple jurisdictions".

Orban and his government's representative said they had a "zero tolerance" of antisemitism, explaining the posters were aiming to persuade voters that George Soros was a "national security risk".

Hours later, in an apparent attempt to ally Israel with Hungary, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a "clarification", denouncing George Soros, stating that he "continuously undermines Israel's democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself".

George Soros's views are more or less the common views in Meretz and in the Labor Party.

George Soros said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat Bush "if someone guaranteed it".

George Soros's 2003 book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, was a forthright critique of the Bush administration's "War on Terror" as misconceived and counterproductive, and a polemic against the re-election of Bush.

George Soros explains the title in the closing chapter by pointing out the parallels in this political context with the self-reinforcing reflexive processes that generate bubbles in stock prices.

In 2017, George Soros described Donald Trump as a con man, and predicted Trump would fail because he believed Trump's ideas were self-contradictory.

George Soros said he believed Trump was preparing for a trade war and expected financial markets to do poorly.

George Soros hosted a dinner for Conservative donors at his London home to encourage them to follow his lead.

In 2018, George Soros highlighted that Europe faces major challenges related to immigration, austerity, and nations leaving the EU.

George Soros holds that Europe is facing an existential crisis, in view of the rise of populism, the refugee crisis and a growing rift between Europe and the United States.

George Soros has stated that "the euro has many unresolved problems" which "must not be allowed to destroy the European Union".

George Soros advocated replacing the notion of a multi-speed Europe by the aim of a "multi-track Europe" that would allow member states a wider variety of choices.

In view of the possibility of a further increase of the number of refugees from Africa to Europe, George Soros proposes that the European Union devise a "Marshall Plan for Africa", fostering education and employment in Africa in order to reduce emigration.

In July 2015, George Soros stated that a "strategic partnership between the US and China could prevent the evolution of two power blocks that may be drawn into military conflict".

In January 2016, during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, George Soros stated that "[a] hard landing is practically unavoidable".

In January 2019, George Soros used his annual speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to label Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China, as the "most dangerous opponent of open societies", saying: "China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it is the wealthiest, strongest and technologically most advanced".

George Soros urged the United States not to allow the Chinese technology companies Huawei and ZTE to dominate the 5G telecommunications market as this would present an "unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world".

George Soros criticized the newest form of China's Big Brother-like system of mass surveillance called the Social Credit System, saying it would give Xi "total control" over the people of China.

Additionally, George Soros is very critical of American companies that ignore Chinese human rights violations for business reasons, for example slamming BlackRock's decision to invest big in China as detrimental to worldwide democracy and US national security.

In July 2015, George Soros stated that Putin's annexation of Crimea was a challenge to the "prevailing world order", specifically the European Union.

George Soros hypothesized that Putin wants to "destabilize all of Ukraine by precipitating a financial and political collapse for which he can disclaim responsibility, while avoiding occupation of a part of eastern Ukraine, which would then depend on Russia for economic support".

In May 2022, George Soros stated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine may be the start of "a third world war" and that Putin must be defeated "as soon as possible".

George 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.

George Soros has made his mark as an enormously successful speculator, wise enough to largely withdraw when still way ahead of the game.

George Soros played a role in the peaceful transition from communism to democracy in Hungary and provided a substantial endowment to Central European University in Budapest.

On October 17,2017, it was announced that George Soros had transferred $18 billion to the Open Society Foundations.

In October 2018, George Soros donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation via the Wikimedia Endowment program.

In July 2020, George Soros's Foundations announced plans to give $220 million in grants for racial justice groups, criminal justice reform and civic engagement.

In 2008, George Soros met Tamiko Bolton; they married September 21,2013.

George Soros received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research, the University of Oxford in 1980, the Corvinus University of Budapest, and Yale University in 1991.

George Soros received an honorary degree in economics from the University of Bologna in 1995.

In 2005, George Soros was a minority partner in a group that tried to buy the Washington Nationals, a Major League baseball team.

Some Republican lawmakers suggested that they might move to revoke Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption if George Soros bought the team.

In 2008, George Soros's name was associated with AS Roma, an Italian association football team, but the club was not sold.

In 2008, Soros was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame along with Alfred Jones, Bruce Kovner, David Swensen, Jack Nash, James Simons, Julian Roberston, Kenneth Griffin, Leon Levy, Louis Bacon, Michael Steinhardt, Paul Tudor Jones, Seth Klarman, and Steven A Cohen.

In January 2014, George Soros was ranked number 1 in LCH Investments list of top 20 managers having posting gains of almost $42 billion since the launch of his Quantum Endowment Fund in 1973.

In July 2017, George Soros was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

George 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".