George Soros already has a successor. The most controversial investor and philanthropist of the last century, the target of all the attacks of right-wing populism that attributes Mephistophelean powers to him (exactly the same as in his years as a financier, the left saw him as an agent of Evil, with a capital letter) will be replaced the head of the non-profit entity that controls his donations, the Open Society Foundation, by his son, Alexander, commonly known as Alex.
The Open Society Foundation has assets under management of 25,000 million dollars (more than 23,000 million euros), and in the coming years it will receive another 25,000 million more, coming from the family office, that is, the manager that manages the assets of Soros since he closed his hedge fund in 2011. Soros returned the money to his investors and limited himself to continuing to manage his fortune so as not to have to give information about his financial operations to the market regulator, which was one of the measures imposed on hedge funds by the government of Barack Obama – which the financier had supported and continued to support – to introduce some transparency into the international financial system after the catastrophe of junk mortgages.
The news was broken on Sunday by the financial newspaper The Wall Street Journal, a media outlet owned by another hugely involved billionaire in politics credited by the global left since the triumphs of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and Brexit: Rupert Murdoch. Given that Alex, his father, and his brother Jonathan – who has lost the battle for the succession – speak to the Journal, it is possible to think that what the billions unite the most irreconcilable ideological differences. Another option is that the Murdochs and Soros simply traded notes about how to run a succession in an empire run by a domineering father figure who must dole out unimaginable wealth to a succession of sons from different mothers.
Ideologically, Alex is like his father. It is located in the field of social democracy, secularism and liberal democracy, with emphasis on the defense of freedoms and other more controversial rights — which a part of the population denies are rights — such as abortion and euthanasia. .
In certain things, the profile of the heir is different from both his father and Jonathan. The most obvious is age: 37 years against 52 for the defeated applicant and 92 for the patriarch. Second, his style. “I am more political,” he tells the Journal, adding that he has recently met with the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, several senior officials from the Joe Biden government, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Brazilian President Luis Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva. It is difficult how one can be more political than George Soros, whose list of friends includes personalities as varied as Bill Clinton, Felipe González or the philosopher from the London School of Economics John Gray. But if Alex says it, it will be true.
Another difference: Alex is a practicing Jew and has visited Israel on several occasions, unlike his father, who, despite escaping the Holocaust in his native Hungary, is an atheist and does not seem to have much sympathy for that country. Alex’s childhood is also very different from that of his father and his older brother. The former was not only about to end up being murdered in his childhood by the Nazis, but when he emigrated to London, he sought a life as a cook before entering the London School of Economics, where he learned about the work of the philosopher Karl Popper. , which has marked him enormously. All his life, Soros has been, first and foremost, a ‘trader’ – that is, someone who, no matter how much mathematical jargon he uses, tries to buy low and sell high – with intellectual pretensions.
This has led him to manufacture a series of pseudo-philosophical theories – especially that of “reflexivity” – that border on the absurd, the childish and the ridiculous, for which no academic or educational institution has dared to criticize seeing a man who win and distribute millions as if nothing had happened. Jonathan belongs to the same school. Although he was born into a wealthy family-Soros in 1971 already had considerable wealth-it cannot be said that he grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, as they say in the US to speak of the ‘born’ rich. In fact, he played a central role during the subprime mortgage crisis and the Eurocrisis, when Quantum, Soros’s most famous fund, navigated smoothly through turmoil that decimated the competition.
Alex ex different. He was born in 1985, to George’s second wife, at the height of the financial deregulation boom that caused the explosion of hedge funds. When she was 7 years old, her father ‘broke’ the Bank of England, forced the pound out of the European Monetary System and made a billion dollars of the time in one week of epic ‘trade’. But that fell far away for young Alex. Although he attended a very exclusive private school in Manhattan, he had a fat complex, and lived in a state of terror for his father – whom he didn’t see much – after one of his classmates, with typically childish sadism, told him to be careful. They weren’t going to kidnap him.
His interest in finances, unlike Jonathan and his own father, is minuscule. Alex is an intellectual. And that is what seems to have convinced the aged patriarch to give him the keys to the kingdom. That and the fact that, unlike Jonathan, Alex has never contradicted his father at Open Society meetings. At the helm of the organization, however, he is likely to change it, but only at the margins. As an American, Alex seems to be more interested in the United States than the rest of the world, which could be good news for Viktor Orban in Hungary, Andrzej Duda in Poland, and of course Vladimir Putin. But that doesn’t mean he’s weaker than his father. On the contrary. When, after Donald Trump’s victory, the Open Society Foundation faced a possible investigation by the US federal state for political reasons, it was Alex who convinced the rest of the organization’s board of trustees to increase their programs in countries like the US and in regions like Latin America.
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