George Soros

• 1. Introduction

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  George Soros was born György Schwartz on the 12th of August 1930 in Budapest, into a prosperous Jewish family that would spend the next decade and a half outrunning history. His father Tivadar was a lawyer, an Esperanto author, and a former prisoner of war who had once escaped from Russia on foot. In 1936, the family changed their surname from the German-Jewish "Schwartz" to "Soros" - partly as protective camouflage in a country growing more dangerous by the year, and partly because Tivadar liked that it was a palindrome. In Hungarian, soros means "next." In Esperanto, a language Tivadar taught his son, it means "will soar."

  By the time Soros was 13, the Nazis had occupied Hungary. By the time he was 14, he was posing as the Christian godson of a government official. By his early 60s, he had broken the Bank of England and pocketed over a billion dollars in a single bet. And by 2020, Forbes was calling him the most generous giver in the world, measured as a share of net worth, after he donated more than $32 billion to his Open Society Foundations.

  How one man moved from hiding his identity to becoming one of the most recognized - and conspired against - figures in modern finance and politics is the story this documentary will follow.

• 2. Survival and Formation

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  Tivadar Soros was not just a man who survived World War I as a prisoner of war. He was someone who escaped captivity in Russia and returned to his family in Budapest. That temperament - pragmatic, resourceful, quietly heroic - shaped his son's early years in ways that would echo across decades.

  When the Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944, Soros was 13 years old. Jewish children were barred from school and ordered to report to the Judenrat, the Jewish Council established during the occupation. Soros was given small slips of paper - deportation notices for Hungarian Jewish lawyers - and told to deliver them. His father recognized the notices immediately. Tivadar told his son to warn the people that reporting would mean deportation. Soros described this episode to writer Michael Lewis years later, recalling the moment he took the paper to his father and his father's instant recognition of what it meant.

  Soros did not return to that job. His family survived by purchasing forged documents identifying them as Christians. At 14, he posed as the Christian godson of an official in the collaborationist government's Ministry of Agriculture. On one occasion, rather than leave the teenager alone, that official took Soros along while conducting an inventory of a confiscated Jewish estate. Soros later wrote that 1944 had been "the happiest year of his life" because it gave him a front-row seat to his father's heroism. Tivadar saved not just his immediate family but many other Hungarian Jews as well.

  In 1945, Soros survived the Siege of Budapest, during which Soviet and German forces fought house to house through the city. He and his mother sheltered for a time with the family of Elza Brandeisz, attending their Lutheran church. When he was 17, Soros moved first to Paris, then to England, carrying a handful of Esperanto words and the memory of a father who had refused to be beaten by circumstance.

• 3. London, Karl Popper, and a Theory

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  At the London School of Economics, Soros studied under the philosopher Karl Popper, whose book The Open Society and Its Enemies would eventually give Soros the name for his philanthropic network. Between classes, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter. He occasionally stood at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, lecturing in Esperanto about the virtues of internationalism. He once received £40 from a Quaker charity.

  He earned his Bachelor of Science in philosophy in 1951 and his Master of Science in philosophy in 1954, both from the London School of Economics. His grades were not strong enough for a career in academia, which he had wanted. Instead, he wrote to every managing director of every merchant bank in London, received one or two replies, and secured a job.

  At Wertheim and Co., where he worked from 1959 to 1963 as an analyst of European securities, Soros began developing the theory of reflexivity that would define both his investment approach and his broader worldview. The theory extended ideas he had absorbed from Popper. Reflexivity holds that market values are often driven by the fallible beliefs of participants, not by economic fundamentals alone. Those beliefs and market events feed back on each other in loops, producing the procyclical booms and busts that standard neoclassical economics had struggled to explain.

  Soros argued that markets exist in either a "near to equilibrium" or a "far from equilibrium" state, and that the conventional efficient market hypothesis simply does not apply when markets are moving rapidly in either direction. His own financial success, he later said, was directly attributable to the edge his understanding of reflexivity gave him. Economists initially dismissed his theories. After the 2008 financial crisis, they became the subject of a dedicated issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.

• 4. Building Quantum

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  In 1954, Soros began his financial career as a clerk at Singer and Friedlander, a merchant bank in London. A colleague named Robert Mayer suggested he apply to his father's brokerage, F. M. Mayer of New York, and in 1956 Soros moved to New York City to trade European stocks there. He specialized in European equities at a moment when U.S. institutional investors were paying close attention to the newly formed Coal and Steel Community, which later became the Common Market.

  At Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, where he served from 1963 to 1973, Soros found the work uninspiring. The Interest Equalization Tax had undercut European trading. He spent much of the period from 1963 to 1966 revising his philosophy dissertation. In 1966 he started an experimental fund with $100,000 of the firm's money. In 1969, he and the firm's chairman Henry H. Arnhold established the Double Eagle hedge fund with $4 million of investors' capital, including $250,000 of Soros's own money. The fund was based in Curaçao, Dutch Antilles.

  In 1970, Soros founded Soros Fund Management. He and his collaborator Jim Rogers took returns on their capital and 20 percent of the profits each year, reinvesting much of both. By 1973, the Double Eagle Fund held $12 million and formed the basis of what was renamed the Quantum Fund. By 1981, Quantum had grown to $400 million, before a 22-percent loss that year and investor redemptions cut it to $200 million.

  Among those who held senior positions at Soros Fund Management at various points were Jim Rogers, Stanley Druckenmiller, Mark Schwartz, Keith Anderson, and Soros's two sons. In 2013, Quantum made $5.5 billion in a single year. Since its inception in 1973, the fund has generated $40 billion in total.

• 5. Black Wednesday

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  Stanley Druckenmiller, who traded under Soros, had originally spotted weakness in the British pound. His account of what happened next is blunt: Soros's contribution was "pushing him to take a gigantic position."

  For months leading up to September 1992, Soros had been building a short position in pounds sterling. He had identified what he saw as a structural problem: the rate at which Britain had entered the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was too high, inflation was running at triple the German rate, and British interest rates were damaging asset prices. Soros believed the UK government would be unwilling either to raise rates sharply enough to defend the pound within the mechanism or to float the currency freely.

  By the 16th of September 1992 - the day that became known as Black Wednesday - Soros's fund had sold short more than $10 billion in pounds. On October 26 of that year, The New York Times quoted Soros directly: "Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell."

  The UK withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The pound fell. Soros's profit was estimated at over $1 billion. The estimated cost to the UK Treasury was £3.4 billion. The phrase that followed Soros from that point forward - "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" - was not one he invented, but it was one he could not escape.

  Five years later, during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad accused Soros of using his wealth to punish the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for welcoming Myanmar as a member. Mahathir made explicit reference to Soros's Jewish background. In 2006, nine years after the accusation, Mahathir met with Soros and afterward acknowledged that Soros had not been responsible for the crisis.

• 6. Open Society

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  Soros began funding dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain from 1979 onward. His early support included Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he opened his first Open Society Institute in Hungary with a budget of $3 million.

  A 2017 study found that a grant program Soros ran for scientists in former Soviet republics shortly after the Soviet collapse more than doubled scientific publications among recipients, significantly encouraged scientists to stay in the sciences, and produced long-lasting benefits. The program reached more than 28,000 scientists.

  In South Africa, Soros's involvement with post-apartheid housing took an unusual form. In 1995, the National Urban Reconstruction and Housing Agency was created as a joint venture between the South African government and the Soros Economic Development Fund. Both contributed $5 million. When South African banks resisted, Soros pledged $50 million in loan guarantees conditional on an additional $250 million being raised from other contributors worldwide. By 2001, the agency had built 70,000 homes. By 2007, the total had reached 200,000. Almost all loans to builders - who were Black South Africans - were repaid.

  By October 2017, Soros had transferred $18 billion to the Open Society Foundations. The OSF runs active programs in more than 60 countries, with expenditures averaging roughly $600 million a year. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University in Budapest, providing one of Europe's largest higher education endowments. In January 2020, he announced a $1 billion endowment at the World Economic Forum to create the Open Society University Network, a global network of educational institutions in partnership with Bard College and the Central European University.

• 7. Target of Conspiracy

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  On the 22nd of October 2018, a pipe bomb was placed in the mailbox at Soros's home in Katonah, New York. A caretaker discovered it, removed it from the property, and notified authorities. The FBI photographed and detonated the device. In the days that followed, similar bombs were mailed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democrats and liberals. On October 26, Cesar Sayoc Jr. was arrested in Aventura, Florida. In August 2019, Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison for mailing 16 pipe bombs to 13 victims. None of the devices exploded.

  The pipe bomb was one physical expression of a broader phenomenon. Because of his Jewish identity, his wealth, and his philanthropy, Soros has been described as "the perfect code word" for conspiracy theories that link antisemitism and Islamophobia. Prominent claims have cast him as a puppet master behind the 2015 European migrant crisis, as a funder of political upheaval worldwide, and as the orchestrator of plots involving figures ranging from the Rothschilds to the Illuminati.

  In Hungary, the government of Viktor Orbán spent what was estimated to have cost 5.7 billion forints - then worth roughly $21 million - on a poster campaign featuring Soros's face and slogans including "Let's not allow Soros to have the last laugh." The Israeli ambassador to Hungary said the campaign "evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear," a reference to Hungary's role in the deportation of 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Lydia Gall of Human Rights Watch described the posters as reminiscent of Nazi propaganda featuring what was called "the laughing Jew."

  In 2018, The New York Times reported that conspiracy theories about Soros had "gone mainstream, to nearly every corner of the Republican Party." Soros, who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a child by hiding his identity, has spent the second half of his life as one of the most recognized targets of the same style of scapegoating he once escaped.