Who is the highest paid hedge fund manager in the world?
British Chris Hohn may be one of the candidates.
In 2023 alone, he will give himself 2.5 billion dividends.
This is just a part of his wealth. The TCI investment fund (the Children Investment Fund Management) he owns gives him huge dividends every year, like a "hen" who can lay golden eggs.
In addition, he is also known as "Britain's most expensive divorced man". In 2014, he and his ex-wife divorced, and the ex-wife directly shared $530 million from Chris Horn. This did not affect his wealth.
How on earth did Chris Horne become the "invisible goose" of the investment community?
Earn 6.81 million yuan every day
Recently, the most shocking news to the European hedge fund industry was that the founder of TCI Investment Fund Management, Chris Hohn, "paid" 276 million pounds of "dividends" to himself within the year.
According to the latest exchange rate, the above salary figure is equivalent to 2.487 billion yuan.
This means that the head of the hedge fund earns 6.81 million yuan every natural day within a year.
If it is calculated on a trading day, the daily salary level will be higher!
But this is not the most he earns in a single year.
The year before, TCI had allocated 574 million pounds to Chris Horn, more than twice the amount this year.
Therefore, it is not difficult for you to understand how Chris Horn has a fortune of more than 60 billion.
The Prime Minister worked for him
Chris Horne's wealth mainly comes from all its hedge fund companies, TCI.
This is a standard traditional equity investment institution, and its main business is to speculate in stocks.
According to the official website of the institution, TCI's investment strategy focuses on fundamental value investment, covering global stocks, as well as real estate loan business.
But with this business alone, TCI Investment Fund has made a lot of money, even surpassing the Renaissance (the calendar company of the Medal Fund) and Castle Investment (the most profitable institution in the world last year) in the United States in 2019.
The proper hedge industry is a "winner in life".
TCI Investment Fund, founded in 2003, is based in London. After its full English name is translated into Chinese, it is called "Children's Investment Fund Management Company".
This organization has employed many powerful people, including the current British "Prime Minister" Sunak, who worked for TCI for three years.
Born in a "humble family"
The soul of TCI Investment Fund is Chris Horne, the protagonist of this article. (See the figure below)
According to the statistics of a well-known platform, by the end of 2022, Horn's "wealth" had reached 8.21 billion US dollars, equivalent to 58.6 billion yuan.
In other words, Horne's wealth is comparable to that of Cai Chongxin, who has reached US $8.5 billion and is higher than that of celebrities such as Li Zekai and He Chaoqiong.
According to the data, Horne's father was an auto mechanic born in Jamaica and moved to Britain in 1960. Horne entered the University of Southampton in the 1980s and was awarded the first class honors in accounting and business economics. After that, he graduated from Harvard Business School.
At the beginning of his career, Horn first worked in a private equity institution, then joined a hedge fund and was promoted to the head of its London business.
Anyway, he is very profitable. It is said that Horne had earned 75 million pounds from his former employer when he founded TCI Investment Fund in 2003.
How to earn money?
TCI Investment Fund must have some "unique skills" to earn so much money.
For example, in the international capital market, he has "Radical Shareholder Doctrine" Label for.
The so-called "Shareholder Activism" refers to the active intervention and participation of external shareholders in major business decisions of the company.
Investors of this style, at the extreme, are "vulture investors" who buy companies at low prices and then sell them.
Horne may not be so extreme, but he is not a good stubble. He often gives "guidance" to the companies he invests in.
In addition, he is also good at mastering big bull stocks. On the official website of TCI Investment Fund, important investment targets such as aircraft manufacturing giant Airbus, Google parent company Alphabet, and Spanish telecommunications company Cellnex are listed.
Big companies often "point fingers"
In November 2022, the hedge fund called on Google's parent company to reduce the loss of long-term bets in the autonomous car sector, Waymo, and "urged" the company to significantly cut staff and salaries, thereby reducing operating costs.
Horne wrote a letter to the CEO of Alphabet, saying that the layoff rate should reach 20%!
This is no longer "investment advice", almost "finger pointing"!
In February 2023, Horn also asked Airbus to immediately give up its plan to acquire the shares of Atos, a French IT company. This hedge fund holds about 3% of the shares of Airbus. Horn questioned that the above acquisition plan has motives other than investment.
In addition, in 2006, TCI Investment Fund also invested in Hong Kong shares of LinkedIn Real Estate, and then had a "fierce confrontation" with the management of the institution.
In the same year, Zheng Mingxun, the former chairman of LinkedIn Real Estate, described TCI Fund's investment in LinkedIn as "buying the wrong goods", and said that this institution did not understand the social and public sentiment in Hong Kong, and thought that the investment in LinkedIn Real Estate would quickly increase the value of the mall.
Most importantly, the former chairman of LinkedIn Real Estate resigned for personal reasons a few months before he made the above remarks. At that time, other executives also left. The market speculated that TCI had been "forcing" the management of the listed company to increase the rent after its acquisition of shares and foreign exchange, which led to the new shareholder's business philosophy being different from the original management team.
From one side, we can see the investment characteristics of this institution.
