92-year-old Hungarian American financier George Soros, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in history, is reportedly turning over his $25 billion empire to his son, 37-year-old Alex Soros. While the elder Soros’ personal wealth is estimated to be ‘just’ $6.7 billion by Forbes, which puts him among the 400 wealthiest people in the world, the combined endowments of his NGO network Open Society Foundations are totalling the $25 billion headlines are talking about now.
Previously, Soros claimed that he was not planning to pass the chair of his foundation network to any of his five children. However, in the wake of the recent development, he told media outlets that Alex ‘has earned’ the position after all.
Viktor Orbán reacted to the news with a succinct tweet:
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Alex Soros said that he is ‘more political’ than his father,
which is not a good omen for conservatism in the US or worldwide.
George Soros and his web of activist organisations have already been among the top Democrat donors, election cycle after election cycle. For the 2022 midterm elections, Soros gave by far the most money on either side of the aisle, $128.5 million. That is despite the fact that as a party out of power during the midterms and with a slagging economy, the Republicans were in a much stronger position to win seats in Congress.
That is why it comes off as rather ridiculous when Alex Soros says ‘as much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it, too’, as quoted from the recent WSJ interview with him. In the interview, he went on to claim that he will make voting and abortion rights the priority of the activism of his NGOs.
Democrats have long been campaigning for more lax voter registration and identification laws. Their proposals have also included doing away with the requirement of photo IDs at the polls, on the dubious claim that it is a racist practice.
Who Is George Soros?
Goerge Soros is covered a lot in Hungarian media for his political activism, however, less is said about his career as an investor—which, despite all the due criticism for his nefarious activities, is an exceptional one.
He openly went against the prevalent ‘efficient market theory’, meaning the belief that stocks and other securities are, in general, reasonably priced by automatic market forces. He set up his hedge fund, Double Eagle, in 1969. His unconventional investing strategies based on his unique economic theory, which included mass short selling and market timing, made him able to do what only a tiny fraction of investors can do: consistently beating the market for a prolonged period of time. ‘Beating the market’ means achieving higher returns than what traditional index funds tied to the DOW or the S&P 500 yield. Soros managed to do just that.
His hedge fund averaged a 20 per cent annual return on investment for over three decades, between 1970 and 2011.
However, even before getting into the political arena, George Soros’ exploits were not without controversy. In 1992, he began heavily shorting the British Pound, knowing full well that his mass selling of the currency is going to result in major downward pressure on it. That pressure had to be forcefully countered by the Bank of England by raising interest rates, as at the time, the UK was part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), which tied the currencies included to each other at fixed exchange rates.
Soros began aggressively spreading rumours in investment banking circles that the British Pound would soon be kicked out of ERM, casting even more doubt about the British Pound among forex traders. It ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, as on 16 September 1992, known as Black Wednesday, the British government did give up and withdrew its currency from the ERM. This resulted in the Pound Sterling losing 4.2 per cent of its value in one day, while the United Kingdom was thrown into a deep, prolonged time of economic turmoil.
While George Soros managed to make himself about $1 billion in profit, the 60 million people living in the UK at the time suffered greatly.
The first time Soros openly supported a political candidate was in 2004, when he backed the Democrat John Kerry against incumbent President George W. Bush from the Republican party. His efforts were in vain at that time. He has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars from his wealth every year since, promoting far-left objectives, such as open borders, transgenderism, and—what the new head of operations, Alex Soros highlighted as their main goals—abortion and less secure elections.
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