Geez, Even Fargo Has Gone Upscale
The latest high-flying financial drama is about to be born, and it could shake up the world’s financial order.
The new economy’s top executive is not a Wall Street bigwig, an investment banker. Not even a senior editor in a company town. Instead, he is an investment bank’s managing director, just like you and me. And just like you and me, he is an immigrant.
His name is David Einhorn.
Einhorn, who will likely be a hedge fund titular co-founder of a billion-dollar fund when he goes to work for a U.S. bank, is the founder of Fortress Investment Group, which manages billions of dollars in assets for private-equity and hedge fund clients.
He grew up in Israel, and his family left to avoid a military takeover by the Israelis. He grew up in America, living in New Jersey, and as an undergraduate in Berkeley, California, he worked in the investment world. But he decided he wanted to work in business and finance. He landed a job managing a corporate retirement savings plan and a number of other private-equity and hedge fund clients, but after a number of years he tired of corporate finance. “At the time I was doing this job, there was no personal life and I was working every day,” he says.
So he quit.
Einhorn then went to the London School of Economics, where he earned a master’s degree in economics.
After he graduated, he went to work for a hedge fund called KKR, where he was brought in as a junior analyst to help manage the portfolio of another hedge fund called Fairholme, which was headed by Michael Steinhardt, an early investor who made millions of dollars from the dot-com boom boom and, later, from other, less visible hedge funds.
Einhorn was a perfect fit. He was smart, he was comfortable with the hedge fund world, he was not in his late 20s, and he had the experience.
That’s
