George Soros

Born György Schwartz in Budapest in 1930, Soros survived the Nazi occupation as a Jewish teenager, then left for London in 1947 and studied philosophy at the London School of Economics. He worked in merchant banks before launching his first hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969; a year later he founded Soros Fund Management, which became Quantum Fund and grew from $12 million to $25 billion. On Black Wednesday in 1992, his $10 billion short against sterling earned him the nickname "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" and a billion-dollar profit. Since 1979 he has given over $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations - 64% of his original fortune - funding anti-poverty work, transparency initiatives, scholarships, and institutions like Central European University, and helping accelerate the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. That same reach made him a target: far-right groups cast the Holocaust survivor as a shadowy orchestrator, conspiracy theories that have been condemned as antisemitic and that, by 2018, had spread through mainstream American conservative politics.