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| 1. James Simons / $1.6 billion | ||
| Title: Founder and non-executive chairmanFirm: Renaissance Technologies (East Setauket, New York)Age: 782016 Rank: No. 12016 Earnings: $1.6 billion2015 Rank: No. 1 (tie)2015 Earnings: $1.7 billionYears on list: 16 | Source of BS in mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology | |
The legend continues.
Jim Simons may not be running Renaissance Technologies and its computer-driven hedge funds on a day-to-day basis — he serves as chairman and spends most of his time on philanthropy and his foundation — but the firm created by the math whiz and former code cracker for the Pentagon’s secretive Institute for Defense Analyses at Princeton University racked up some of the best returns among hedge funds last year.
The Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF) and the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha Fund (RIDA), the firm’s two main funds open all year to outsiders, rose 20.64 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively. As a result, Simons tops this year’s ranking with $1.6 billion after tying for first place the previous year. He remains the only person to qualify for the Rich List all 16 years, earning nearly $25 billion over this span. We know at least one area where he spent some of that money, besides philanthropy: Last year Simons gave more than $7 million to a Hillary Clinton super PAC.
In 2016, Simons was honored by the two educational institutions where he received his degrees. Massachusetts Institute of Technology renamed its legendary Building 2 as the Simons Building in a tribute to Simons and his wife, Marilyn, who bankrolled its renovation and restoration. It is now the headquarters for MIT’s Math Department. Additionally, the University of California, Berkeley grad was named Cal Alumnus of the Year in 2016. In a rare interview, with the Berkeley alumni magazine, Simons revealed a less disciplined period of his life, when he and some friends from Colombia took a motor scooter trip from Boston to Bogotá, riding through Mexico and other Central American countries. “Everyone wanted to see the gringos who had done this crazy thing, so we were invited to all kinds of people’s houses,” he recalled.
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