JESSE COHN

Cohn grew up in Baldwin, New York, and taught himself to code as a teenager, even earning an IT certification from Novell before college. He studied finance at the Wharton School and graduated in 2002, then worked in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley.

He joined Elliott Management in 2004 at age 24 and quickly became the firm's point man on technology. Over the next two decades he led more than 30 shareholder campaigns against companies like Compuware, BMC Software, Informatica, and LifeLock.

The biggest was EMC, which Dell bought for about $67 billion in 2015 after Elliott's pressure. Elliott made him a partner in 2017.

He has sat on the boards of eBay and Twitter and taken on giants including AT&T, SAP, and Salesforce.

Elliott Management, Elliott Investment Management

Cohn's weapon is the letter. He and his team do exhaustive research, then send boards long, carefully argued documents laying out exactly how the company is underperforming and what to do about it.

He built his name in technology, an area older activists avoided because it moves fast and is hard to value. His approach has shifted over the years from aggressive public brawls toward a more collaborative style, working with management rather than just attacking them.

The outcomes he tends to push for are big and final. Sell the company, split it up, or bring in new leadership.

More than a dozen of his targets ended up bought out entirely.

EMC. Elliott took a stake in the data-storage giant and pushed hard for a sale, and in 2015 Dell agreed to buy EMC for roughly $67 billion, one of the largest technology deals ever at the time.

It validated Cohn's whole thesis that a patient activist could force even a sprawling tech conglomerate to make a bold move. His broader record of turning more than a dozen targets into full buyouts, including BMC Software, Informatica, and LifeLock, is arguably even more impressive than any single deal.

Not every Elliott campaign lands cleanly. The firm's high-profile push at AT&T in 2019 produced a plan and a truce, but the telecom giant's turnaround stayed slow and messy for years afterward, a reminder that even Elliott cannot fix a lumbering conglomerate overnight.

Cohn has also openly evolved his tactics, moving away from the scorched-earth public attacks of his early years, which is a quiet admission that the aggressive approach sometimes cost more goodwill than it was worth.

Cohn believes active investors keep markets healthy by holding management teams accountable in a world increasingly dominated by passive index funds that do not vote with any conviction. He argues global markets are the engine of modern finance and that engaged owners make companies run better.

When Elliott targets a company, his stated goal is closing the gap between what a business is worth and what its stock reflects. He frames activism less as raiding and more as demanding that great companies live up to their own potential.

Cohn is intensely private about his personal life, in keeping with his low public profile. He grew up in Baldwin on Long Island in a family that was not connected to Wall Street.

Cohn graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, where he studied finance while indulging his teenage love of computer programming. That coding background is a big reason he became Elliott's technology specialist when few activists understood the sector.