Who

One of the few money managers who truly deserve the label "legendary," Soros presides over the sprawling hedge fund that bears his name. He's also one of the world's leading philanthropists and a vociferous political activist.

Backstory

György Schwartz was born into a well-heeled Jewish family in pre-war Budapest. It was his father, Tivadar, a lawyer and intellectual, who managed to save the family from the Holocaust: In the run-up to the Nazi invasion of Hungary, Tivadar changed the family name to the less Jewish-sounding Soros—it means "to soar" in Esperanto—and after the Germans arrived in Budapest, Tivadar crafted new identities for the family. (George became "Sandor Kiss," the son of a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Agriculture.) For three years, George posed as a Christian and lived under an assumed identity; shortly after the war's conclusion, he packed his bags and headed to England, enrolling at the London School of Economics and supporting himself as a waiter, house painter, railway porter, and handbag salesman.

In 1956, Soros left for the U.S. with $5,000 in his pocket and took a succession of jobs at small investment firms in New York. He eventually went on his own in 1969, forming what would later become known as Quantum Fund—perhaps the most famous hedge fund of all time—with partner Jim Rogers. Starting off with $13 million in capital, Quantum racked up above-average returns throughout the '70s, a period of extraordinary economic volatility, and within a decade Quantum had some $400 million under management. His most famous deal came in 1992 when he and his right-hand, Stanley Druckenmiller, made an unprecedented $10 billion bet on the direction of the British pound: The duo walked away with a $1 billion profit, and Soros earned fame as "the man who broke the Bank of England." They generated similarly spectacular returns at the end of the decade when they correctly predicted the Asian financial crisis and made big bets against currencies like the Thai baht.

Soros moved away from day-to-day management of his financial empire in the 1990s and eventually handed over the reigns to Druckenmiller. But in 2000, he shifted direction and realigned the fund's management structure, forcing out his protégé following losses related to investments in the tech market, and placing control of the firm in the hands of his sons, Jonathan and Robert. After tending to his many philanthropic and political causes full-time, Soros leapt out of retirement during the summer of 2007 as the credit crisis swept the global financial markets.

Of note

Soros has said that he never actually intended to become a financier. He got into the business, he claims, to subsidize his intellectual passions and had always planned to go into academia after building up a nest-egg. Needless to say, he stuck around for a lot longer than that, but since the 1980s, he's emerged as one of the world's most active philanthropists and political agitators.

Inspired by the political philosophy he adopted as a young man, which was heavily influenced by Karl Popper, who taught Soros at LSE and preached the merits of an "open society" over the totalitarianisms of communism and Nazism, Soros has long used his foundation, the Open Society, to channel billions to various causes that nurture free expression in former Eastern bloc countries. (The non-profit is named for Popper's anti-communist tome The Open Society and Its Enemies.) From distributing thousands of free copy machines (to allow people to disseminate political literature) to creating a major university (Soros's donation of $250 million led to the creation of the Central European University in Hungary) to funding thousands of Russian scientists (who lost their jobs after the collapse of the Soviet Union), the Open Society is one of the largest operations of its kind. Soros is estimated to have given away more than $6 billion over the course of his career. (He was so generous in Russia that the verb "Sorosovat" came into existence; it means to apply for a grant.) In recent years, the financier has turned his attention beyond Eastern Europe: He pledged $50 million to Jeffrey Sachs's Millennium Promise campaign in 2006.

Although it once seemed that Soros would spend the rest of his life focused on his various philanthropic and political causes, he surprised many in 2007 when he decided to return to his eponymous fund. He also demonstrated that he still has a magic touch. One of the few who predicted that the credit markets would collapse, a series of bearish bets during the latter part of 2007 earned Soros's fund a 32 percent return for the year, and he personally walked away with $2.4 billion in earnings.

Keeping score

According to Forbes, Soros is the 80th richest man on the planet, with a net worth of $9 billion. You won't find any evidence of his wealth on his wrist, though: He's partial to black Swatch watches.

Campaign trail

For more than a decade, Soros trained his dollars on political causes outside the U.S., and his contributions generally didn't arouse much attention at home. That changed with the commencement of war in Iraq, when Soros emerged as one of Bush's most outspoken critics over his handling of the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, and he ended up contributing a total of $27 million to pro-Democratic groups such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org in the run-up to the 2004 election. (Ironically, he'd previously given millions to fund campaign finance reform.) At one point, Soros said he was prepared to sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat Bush as long as "someone guaranteed it" (although he later said he was joking). In 2007, he announced he was backing Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Drama

Soros's business activities and political agenda have long stirred up controversy. In one of the more famous incidents, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad labeled Soros a "moron" after it was revealed that the financier had made a killing during Asian financial meltdown. His political activities have been even more contentious. In the '90s, government officials in Beijing accused him of being a CIA operative for pushing for democratic reform in China, and Soros had to shutter Open Society's offices in the country; he was forced to close his office in Russia for much the same reason. And Jewish groups around the world have criticized him for his reluctance to support Jewish causes. Here at home, his fierce opposition to Bush has made him a lightning rod on the political right and a perfect boogeyman for conspiracy-minded types who cannot seem to conjure up a more frightening thought than "a foreign-accented currency speculator, answerable only to himself, who believes in the right to die, liberalized drug laws and gun control and more cooperation with the United Nations." On a related note, Soros doesn't go anywhere without at least two armed bodyguards by his side.

In print

Soros has authored ten books, including 2006's The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror and his most recent, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. Michael T. Kaufman's comprehensive biography, Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire—for which Soros provided the author rare access—was published by Knopf in 2002.

Personal

Soros has been married and divorced twice. He had three kids with his first wife Annaliese Witschak: Jonathan and Robert, who are both deputy chairmen of the company. Soros also has a daughter named Andrea Soros Colombel who is active in various philanthropic causes. He married his second wife, Susan Weber, an art historian 25 years his junior, in 1983. The couple had two sons, Alexander and Gregory, before divorcing in 2005.

Habitat

Soros lives in a duplex at 1060 Fifth Avenue; as part of the divorce settlement with Weber, he paid his ex $24 million to hold on to the 16-room apartment. (Susan moved to Ian Schrager's old apartment on Central Park West.) Soros also has a home in Southampton, a townhouse in London, and a 19-room home in Bedford that he purchased from Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton for $21.5 million.

No joke

In 2005, Soros and his son Gregory were sued after the family Labrador, Naomi, bit a man working at their Westchester home. The younger Soros paid a $250 fine and agreed to keep the dog indoors.