Hedge fund mogul takes home €2.5bn pay packet
Even though many hedge funds earned only lacklustre returns last year and sharply trailed the S&P 500’s 30% gain, it was a banner year for a small number of hedge fund managers, according to Institutional Investors’ Alpha’s 13th annual ranking of the industry’s best paid managers.
Mr Tepper, who runs Appaloosa Management, was followed in second place by Steven A. Cohen, who earned $2.4bn.
For Mr Cohen it was a bittersweet end to his decades as a hedge fund manager which ended when his SAC Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading.
The deal with the government forced him to stop managing money for outsiders and turn hisoperation into a so-called family office.
Investors who run family offices no longer qualify for this list, which explains why George Soros and Carl Icahn no longer make appearances.
The industry’s 25 best paid managers earned $21bn between them, roughly 50% more than they earned in each of the previous two years.
John Paulson, who ranked first on the list twice when his Paulson & Co scored big gains in prior years in bets against overheated mortgages and on gold, came in as the third-highest earner with $2.3bn in pay.
James Simons, a retired mathematician who ran Renaissance Technologies, ranked fourth with $2.2bn while Kenneth Griffin, who laid the groundwork for Citadel in his Harvard dorm room, came in fifth with $950m in earnings.
The magazine’s so-called Rich List’s Second Team, men who failed to rank in the top 25, included a handful of managers who pursue activist investment strategies where they push for change at corporations.
Investors have been putting money into activist funds after their returns outstripped hedge fund gains.
William Ackman, who runs Pershing Square Capital Management, Jeffrey Ubben of ValueAct Capital and Barry Rosenstein of Jana Partners, feature on that list.
