George Soros

Soros doesn't use a fixed strategy. He uses a theory.

He calls it reflexivity — the idea that market participants don't just react to fundamentals, they influence them. House prices going up makes people confident.

Confident people borrow more. Borrowing pushes prices higher.

Until it doesn't. Markets create self-reinforcing loops that diverge from reality for a long time before snapping back.

In practice, this meant making very large macro bets — currencies, interest rates, commodities, whole stock markets — when he believed a loop had gone too far. He didn't diversify to reduce risk.

He concentrated into high-conviction positions and used leverage. He famously said: "It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong."

Arianna Simpson

Simpson invests in crypto the way a founder would, not a spreadsheet jockey. She hunts for the technology that developers actually want to build on.

Then she bets big and holds through the wild swings. She is comfortable being early.

She is comfortable looking wrong for a while. As she puts it, the job is to follow where the best entrepreneurs are already going, not to sit in a room and decide what should be interesting.

In plain English, she buys the picks and shovels of crypto and waits years.

George Soros

He believes in fallibility — specifically, that every market participant is operating on imperfect information, including himself. His approach: form a hypothesis, bet on it, watch for signals that the hypothesis is wrong, and change course decisively when those signals arrive.

He is explicitly anti-certainty. He thinks the most dangerous investor is the one who mistakes confidence for competence.

His philosophy of the open society — the political version — applies equally to markets: no position is so right that it can't be challenged.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson's core belief is that crypto matters most where money is broken. She points back to Zimbabwe.

When your currency loses value by the hour, a network no government controls stops being a toy and becomes a lifeline. She bets on that idea over decades, not quarters.

She also backs builders over hype. The projects that survive are the ones developers keep showing up to work on, bull market or bear market.

Her best investments, she says, are the ones where the founder's thinking is further ahead than her own.

George Soros

He had an unusual relationship with physical discomfort as a risk signal. He's talked about trusting his back pain — when a position was going wrong, he'd feel it before he saw it in the numbers.

That's either profound intuition or a good story. Either way, he wasn't a systematic rule-follower.

He made enormous bets and reversed course on short notice when the thesis broke. His risk management wasn't "don't lose money." It was "don't lose so much that you can't play again."

Arianna Simpson

Simpson is built for crypto's stomach-churning drops. She thinks in decades, not weeks, so an 80% crash reads as noise rather than an emergency.

She proved it the hard way. Autonomous Partners was investing right as the 2018 crypto winter hit, and she kept going.

Her funds are designed to be 10-year-plus funds on purpose. The whole point is to hold long enough that short-term panic stops mattering.

George Soros

He lives in New York and his estate in the Hamptons. He donated over $32 billion — more than 80% of his peak wealth — to the Open Society Foundations.

He's been married three times. His third wife Tamiko Bolton is 42 years younger than him.

He plays tennis. He's in his mid-90s and still occasionally publishes essays on markets and geopolitics.

He handed chairmanship of the Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander in 2023.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson keeps her personal life almost entirely offline, which is rare for someone this visible in crypto. What is public is how she handles the asset itself.

She is a holder, not a day trader. She has said the firm's funds are built to run for a decade or more, and she invests her attention the same way.

For someone whose whole job is digital assets, she treats them less like a casino and more like seeds planted for a long harvest.

George Soros

September 16, 1992. Black Wednesday.

Soros had been building a short position against the British pound for months. Britain was in the Exchange Rate Mechanism — a system that required it to keep the pound within a fixed band against other European currencies.

He believed the pound was overvalued and Britain couldn't sustain the interest rates needed to defend it. He was right.

The Bank of England spent billions trying to hold the peg. It failed.

Britain withdrew from the ERM. Soros made approximately $1 billion that day.

Total profits in the surrounding weeks were closer to $2 billion. He became known as the man who broke the Bank of England.

Arianna Simpson

Phantom. Simpson got in early on the crypto wallet, and a16z crypto backed it when it was a small team building on Solana.

Phantom raised $150 million in January 2025 at a $3 billion valuation. Her other headline deal was a wild ride.

She led the $152 million round in Sky Mavis, the maker of Axie Infinity, in October 2021 and joined its board. Months later the game's Ronin bridge was hacked for about $600 million and the token collapsed.

Phantom is the win. Axie is the reminder that crypto giveth and taketh away.

George Soros

2000. Soros had been warning about the dot-com bubble for years.

He was right about it being a bubble. But he kept buying tech stocks because he thought the momentum would continue a little longer.

It didn't. The Quantum Fund lost $3 billion in a matter of months.

He later said: "I was too early and then I panicked." That's a remarkable thing for someone of his stature to say. The lesson: being right about the direction of a trade doesn't mean you're right about the timing.

Arianna Simpson

Timing. Autonomous Partners launched in late 2017, right at the peak of the crypto mania.

Within months the market fell off a cliff. Bitcoin dropped from nearly $20,000 to around $3,000 by the end of 2018.

Being early is one thing. Being early and then watching the entire market crater tests everyone.

The rough entry taught her a lesson she now lives by. Conviction only pays if you can survive long enough to be proven right.

George Soros

George Soros was born György Schwartz in Budapest in 1930. His family survived the Nazi occupation by obtaining forged papers and hiding.

He saw up close what happens when governments go bad. He fled Hungary after the war, worked as a railway porter and waiter in London, and studied philosophy at the London School of Economics — where he became a student of Karl Popper, whose big idea was that open societies are better than closed ones.

That stuck.

He moved to New York in 1956 and spent the next decade working at brokerages and learning the markets. In 1973 he co-founded the Quantum Fund with Jim Rogers.

From 1970 to 2000, the fund averaged roughly 30% annual returns. That's the second-best sustained hedge fund record in history, behind only Jim Simons.

He stepped back from active management gradually through the 2000s and has spent most of his time on philanthropy ever since.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson grew up in Milan and studied international politics at Penn State. Her turning point came in Zimbabwe in 2013.

She saw firsthand what happens when a currency loses value by the hour. That got her hooked on the idea of money no government can print at will.

She quit her job at Facebook and joined BitGo, a company that guards crypto for big institutions. In 2015 she helped start Crystal Towers Capital, backing young Y Combinator startups.

In 2017 she launched her own crypto fund, Autonomous Partners. She raised it from serious names, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and David Sacks' Craft Ventures.

In 2020 she joined a16z crypto as a deal partner and was later made a general partner.

George Soros

Soros Fund Management is the vehicle. The Quantum Fund, which ran under it, returned roughly 30% annually for three decades.

The 1992 trade — shorting £10 billion of British sterling — was the most famous single day in hedge fund history, but the 30-year sustained record is the real story.

He stepped down from managing outside money in 2011 and converted to a family office. He's donated over $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, which funds democracy and civil society programs in over 120 countries.

That's more money than he kept for himself.

Arianna Simpson

Autonomous Partners was her own show. She started it in 2017 and used it to back crypto projects like Talos, a trading platform, and Mythical Games, a blockchain gaming studio.

At a16z crypto she now helps run one of the largest crypto funds on earth, more than $7 billion across several funds. Her best-known bets there are Phantom, the crypto wallet, and Blackbird, the dining rewards startup from Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal.

She also sits on the board of Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie Infinity. Before all of this she worked at BitGo and Facebook.

George Soros

London School of Economics, BSc and MSc in Philosophy, 1952. Student of Karl Popper.

He's credited Popper's concept of the open society as the foundation of both his philanthropic work and his investment theory.

Arianna Simpson

Simpson went to Penn State, in the Schreyer Honors College. She earned dual degrees in international politics and Spanish.

Not a computer science degree. Not an MBA.

Her real education in money came later, on the ground in Zimbabwe in 2013, watching inflation do its damage in real time.