NOAM GOTTESMAN

Gottesman was born in Israel and raised partly in Switzerland. He started his career at Goldman Sachs in London during the 1980s, working in the fixed income division.

Goldman in the '80s was basically a finishing school for future billionaires, and Gottesman was paying attention.

In 1995, he co-founded GLG Partners with Pierre Lagrange and Jonathan Green. GLG started as a long/short equity fund but quickly expanded into credit, macro, emerging markets, and quantitative strategies.

By the mid-2000s, it was managing $30 billion — making it the largest hedge fund in Europe.

GLG went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007, which was either brilliant timing or lucky timing depending on who you ask. The IPO valued the firm at over $3 billion.

Then the financial crisis hit, assets shrank, and in 2010 Man Group acquired GLG for $1.6 billion. Gottesman and his co-founders walked away with enormous payouts.

After the sale, Gottesman launched TOMS Capital as his personal investment vehicle. He manages his own multi-billion dollar fortune with a small team.

No outside investors, no quarterly letters, no conference appearances. He went from running Europe's biggest hedge fund to being one of its most private billionaires.

GLG Partners was the main event. Co-founded in 1995, it grew into a $30 billion multi-strategy hedge fund and became the largest in Europe.

GLG was known for its aggressive talent recruitment — they'd poach top traders from Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank with huge guaranteed bonuses. The firm went public on NYSE in 2007 before being acquired by Man Group in 2010.

TOMS Capital is his current vehicle — a London-based family office that manages his personal fortune. TOMS invests across public equities, private equity, venture capital, and real estate.

It's made significant investments in technology companies including Deliveroo and other European tech startups.

He also holds significant real estate, including properties in London, Geneva, and the south of France. His investment footprint is global but deliberately quiet.

At GLG, Gottesman ran a multi-strategy approach — spreading capital across long/short equity, credit, macro, and quantitative strategies. He believed the best way to generate consistent returns was to have multiple uncorrelated strategies running simultaneously.

If equities were down, credit might be up. If macro was flat, quant might be printing money.

His personal investing through TOMS Capital is more concentrated. He makes bigger bets on fewer things — particularly tech companies and real estate.

He backed Deliveroo early, which turned into a significant win when the company went public.

Gottesman is fundamentally a talent picker. His success at GLG wasn't about his own trading — it was about recruiting and retaining the best traders in Europe and giving them capital to work with.

The GLG IPO and subsequent sale to Man Group was Gottesman's masterpiece. Taking GLG public in 2007 at a $3 billion valuation, then selling to Man Group in 2010 for $1.6 billion — after the financial crisis had already hit — still resulted in an enormous personal payout of approximately $500 million.

The real genius was the timing of the IPO. Going public in 2007, just before the crisis, meant GLG locked in maximum value.

If they'd waited even six months, the IPO would have been worth half as much or might not have happened at all. Whether that was foresight or luck, Gottesman doesn't say — but the money was real either way.

His early bet on Deliveroo through TOMS Capital also paid handsomely. He invested before the IPO and saw significant returns when the food delivery company went public on the London Stock Exchange.

GLG's post-crisis performance was the hardest period. After the 2008 crash, assets under management dropped significantly as investors redeemed.

Some of GLG's strategies underperformed their benchmarks for several years running. The sale to Man Group in 2010, while profitable for the founders, was essentially an admission that the independent model had gotten harder.

The Deliveroo investment, while ultimately profitable, also had a rocky IPO in 2021. The stock dropped 26% on its first day of trading — one of the worst London IPOs in history.

Gottesman held through the drop, and the position eventually recovered, but the initial optics were brutal.

Gottesman believes that investing is fundamentally a people business. The best strategy in the world fails with the wrong person running it.

The worst strategy sometimes works with the right person. His career is built on that insight.

He's deeply skeptical of the idea that markets are efficient. His view: markets are made by humans, humans are emotional, and emotional humans make predictable mistakes.

The job of a hedge fund is to exploit those mistakes systematically.

He also believes in getting paid and getting out. The GLG sale to Man Group wasn't sentimental — it was the right price at the right time.

Building something and then selling it at peak value is a skill most founders never master.

Gottesman is married and has children. He and his family split time between London and Geneva.

He keeps his family life almost completely private — you won't find photos of his kids online or mentions of his wife in interviews.

He's known in London's financial circles as someone who's generous at dinner, quick-witted, and absolutely unwilling to discuss his portfolio. Friends describe him as the most private billionaire they know.

Gottesman studied at the University of Geneva before starting his career. He doesn't have an MBA or any of the typical American business school credentials.

He learned finance at Goldman Sachs, where he spent the better part of a decade before co-founding GLG. He's proof that in European finance, pedigree comes from your track record, not your diploma.

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