Nassim Nicholas Taleb is about as polarizing of a figure as you can imagine; obviously very confident in his polymath abilities, eager to interweave complex mathematics with a polyglot perspective on the world, and very happy to share his views with anyone willing to follow him on Twitter, Taleb is seen by some as a genius and others as something much less.
Undeniably, Taleb’s quantitative approach to hedging for the risks of extremely unlikely scenarios (which he calls “black swan events”) in order to make a portfolio less likely to fail (or “antifragile” as he prefers it) has made him a tremendous amount of money. But Taleb very much wants more: he wants to be seen as an intellectual and respected as such. That pursuit has led him to criticize and, if we are being honest, downright insult several academics in universities for various reasons. The desire to be seen as at the very least their intellectual equal has been driving this billionaire to remain active in the public, and publishing books vociferously, for years.
Taleb is not alone. Perhaps Taleb’s predecessor, George Soros has been less strident in his disagreements with critics–although the accusations his critics lay on him are substantially worse than the very worst Taleb has gotten, including baseless conspiracies and a metaphysical accusation that Soros is downright evil. Nonetheless, Soros has publicly published his own philosophy, which he calls reflexivity, and which he considers an extension to the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century: Karl Popper. This pedigree doesn’t come from nowhere; Popper was Soros’s tutor at the London School of Economics. Whether Popper would agree with Soros’s position in this grand philosophical tradition, or even if Popper would agree with the ideas behind reflexivity, are open questions—and ones Soros himself has openly discussed himself.
There are other billionaires who have made significant academic contributions, not just before but also after they’ve made their fortunes. Cliff Asness has a publication record as extensive as many tenured professors of finance—and his very techincal, math heavy analyses of classical finance topics like asset correlations put his work deep within the canon of respectable research in academic finance. This despite the fact that Asness’s research doesn’t really bring much money to him or his firm (although, one could argue, that research makes markets more efficient, allowing Asness to make a bigger profit by getting ahead of those trends). Again, Asness’s Twitter persona belies a person who is eager to convince others that his viewpoint on politics, on markets, and on capital allocation are correct, and differing views are wrong.
These three public figures are exceptions; the vast majority of hedge fund principals prefer to be relatively unknown outside of Wall Street—while a few who do (Steven Cohen, for instance) prefer to be known for non-philosophical reasons (Cohen likes to discuss his ownership of the New York Mets when possible). But their existence, and their styles of establishing first principles that become the guiding force for financial decisions suggests that at least some financiers see it as a philosophy that, when applied correctly, not only will result in right bets, but extremely profitable ones. Does this mean we can think of finance as a philosophy—and will it make us rich to do so?
