George Soros

George Soros was born in Hungary in 1930. At a young age Soros started trading currencies on the Hungarian black market during World War 2. Avoiding the fate of many Jewish people as the grandson of a Hungarian official he survived the Nazi occupation and left Hungary in 1947 to live in England.

While living in England Soros attended and graduated from the London School of Economics. While studying Soros became interested in the work of a teacher and philosopher Karl Popper, Which influenced his thinking and later his professional and philanthropic work. 

In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he worked mainly as a financial analyst. Soros admits his intentions were mainly to earn money on Wall Street to finance his interests in writing and philosophy. In 1969 Soros founded his first offshore hedge fund, which grew immensely partly through speculation. In the 1990’s financial analyst’s stated that this speculation had helped weaken Asian and Latin American economies.

In 1970 Soros Co-founded the Quantum Fund with Jim Rogers and it achieved more than a 4000% return within the next ten years, which created most of Soros vast fortune. His net worth reached an estimated $11 billion. 

In 1979 Soros began his philanthropic activities by providing funding for black students to attend the University of Cape Town in South Africa. To date he is chairman of the Open Society Institute and has founded many charity organizations that are active in more than 50 countries including Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States. In recent years the Soros foundations network have spent more than $400 million annually to support projects in these areas. In 1992, Soros founded Central European University, with its primary campus in Budapest, Hungary. 

In 1988, Soros was asked to join a takeover of a French bank but he declined the offer, instead buying the bank's stock. In 2002, a French court ruled that Soros committed insider trading and was fined more than $2 million, the amount he made from the trades. 

In 1992, Soros became famous when he sold short 10 billion pounds, profiting from the Bank of England’s unwillingness to raise interest rates or float its currency. The Bank was forced to withdraw the currency from the European exchange rate mechanism and to devaluate the Pound. Soros earned an estimated US$1.1 billion profit for his efforts and later being known as "the man who broke the Bank of England."

In 1997 in similar conditions as the Asian financial crisis, Soros was accused of bringing down the Malaysian currency, the ringgit. Soros has been a keen author writing 8 books including The Bubble of America Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, George Soros on Globalization, The Alchemy of Finance, Opening the Soviet System, Underwriting Democracy, Soros on: Staying Ahead of the Curve, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered and Open Society: Reforming Global.
                                                                                                                George Soros Biography (Real Estate Developer)