30 Amazing Things You Probably Didn't Know George Soros

George Soros, founder of the Soros Fund Management LLC, is one of the most active philanthropists in the world, who has reportedly donated over $8 billion for various causes like education, human rights and public health. Here are some really interesting facts about the Hungarian-American investor:

1.  Soros is often known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England," because of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.
2.  He was awarded with the Yale International Center for Finance Award from the Yale School of Management in the year 2000.
3.  He formulated an application of Karl Popper's General Theory of Reflexivity to capital markets, which renders a clear picture of asset bubbles and fundamental/market value of securities.
4.  He was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame in the year 2008.
5.  He formed the Open Society Institute, commonly known as the Open Society Foundations (OSF), famously known for managing the network of Soros Foundations that are involved in philanthropic activities all over the world.
6.  He has reportedly co-authored several books on financial and political issues including "Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism" and "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror."
7.  He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy (HonFBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences, in July 2017.
8.  He was named as the Person of the Year for 2018, describing him as a "a standard bearer for liberal democracy, an idea under siege from populists," by the Financial Times.
9.  In the year 2010, he donated $1 million to the Drug Policy Alliance campaign to fund Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana in the state of California, which did not pass the November 2010 elections.
10.  He was ranked number 1 in LCH Investments list of "Top 20 Managers in the World," with his gains of almost $42 billion since the launch of his Quantum Endowment Fund, in January 2014.
11.  Soros was born as Schwartz György on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary to parents Tivadar and Erzsébet, a prosperous non-observant Jewish family.
12.  His father was a lawyer and a well-known Esperanto-speaker, while his mother came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop.
13.  His father changed the surname German-Jewish Schwartz to Soros in the year 1936, as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary.
14.  He was thirteen years old, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary, leading to the barring of Jewish children from attending school, in the year 1944.
15.  He claims the year 1944 to be "the happiest [year] of his life," as he was a witness to his father's heroism, who saved not only his immediate family but also many other Hungarian Jews.
16.  He survived the Siege of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city, in the year 1945.
17.  He survived Nazi Germany-occupied Hungary and immigrated to England in 1947, becoming a student at the London School of Economics.
18.  During his time as a student to Karl Popper, a philosopher, he worked as a railway porter and as a waiter, and even once received £40 from a Quaker charity.
19.  He earned his Bachelor of Science in philosophy and a Master of Science in philosophy from the London School of Economics, in the year 1951 and 1954 respectively.
20.  He had to pick up various part-time jobs to pay for his tuition at the London School of Economics, and even worked as a railway porter and a nightclub waiter.
21.  Immediately after his graduation, he started his financial career as a clerk at Singer & Friedlander, a merchant bank in London in the year 1954.
22.  He later moved to the arbitrage department in Singer and Friedlander, where he was suggested by Robert Mayer, an employee to apply to his father's brokerage house, F.M. Mayer of New York. He served as an arbitrage trader, specializing in European stocks for F. M. Mayer from 1956 to 1959.
23.  He joined the Wertheim & Co in 1959, and had a plan to work for five years, while saving $500,000 to study philosophy.
24.  He served as a vice president at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, a New York based investment bank, from 1963 to 1973. It was during his time there that he set up the Double Eagle hedge fund with $4 million of investors' capital including $250,000 of his own money.
25.  He founded the Soros Fund Management in the year 1970, where his sons, along with Jim Rogers, Stanley Druckenmiller, Mark Schwartz and Keith Anderson, held the senior positions.
26.  He resigned from the management of the Double Eagle Fund in the year 1973, which was later renamed as the Quantum Fund, after the physical theory of quantum mechanics.
27.  Soros has been married three times with his first two marriages ending in divorce. He married Annaliese Witschak in the year 1960, and has three children with her - Robert Daniel Soros, Andrea Soros Colombel and Jonathan Tivadar Soros. The couple divorced in 1983.
28.  He married Susan Weber in the year 1983 and has two children with her - Alexander Soros, and Gregory James Soros. Weber is actually 25 years his junior. The relationship ended in divorce in the year 2005.
29.  He met Tamiko M. Bolton in 2008, and married her on September 21, 2013. Bolton is the daughter of a Japanese-American nurse and a retired naval commander, Robert J. Bolton. She is actually 42 years his junior.
30.  He was one of Hillary Clinton’s most prominent campaign donors. He reportedly made an incorrect prediction that the stock market would drop if Donald Trump won the election. He was also one among the prominent Democrats, who had received pipe bombs at their residence. The device found at his residence was “proactively detonated” by bomb squad technicians.
31.  George Soros Net Worth: $8.3 Billion