James Simons, at $1.6 billion, was the nation’s best-paid hedge fund manager last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Last year was a tough one for hedge funds.
Fed up with lackluster returns, investors took $70 billion out of the $3 trillion industry.
Despite that, even hedge fund managers who underperformed the broader market managed generate hefty paychecks for themselves, according to an annual ranking published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine.
Nearly half of the top 25 earners made single-digit returns for their investors, even as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 12 percent, accounting for reinvested dividends.
The top earner was James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who made $1.6 billion. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates was a close second with $1.4 billion.
Further down the list was Robert Mercer, the co-chief executive of Renaissance and one of the biggest backers of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, who earned $125 million.
What’s also notable is who didn’t make the list: big names like William A. Ackman, John A. Paulson and Edward S. Lampert.
The Bezos Effect, 20 Years On
It is two decades since
Amazon.com went public, and Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, is clearly having a moment, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in the DealBook column.
Despite fierce criticism over the years, Mr. Bezos has proved that he has “an authentic, legitimate claim on having changed the way we live,” Mr. Sorkin writes.
Amazon hasn’t just changed how we shop, but also how companies use computers and how we interact with technology by voice.
What differentiates Mr. Bezos from other chief executives is his focus on the long term — he’s not worried about the next quarter; he’s thinking about what will happen years from now.
“That is a competitive advantage that many chief executives could learn from,” Mr. Sorkin writes.
Uber Engineer Blocked From Self-Driving Car Work
A federal judge ordered Uber to bar its star engineer from working on a key component of the company’s self-driving car technology, but stopped short of telling the ride-hailing company to shut down the entire program.
Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco said that Waymo, the self-driving car business that operates under Google’s parent company, had “compelling evidence” that Anthony Levandowski downloaded over 14,000 confidential files from Waymo immediately before leaving to form a company that was later acquired by Uber.
But the judge also ruled that Waymo significantly “overreached” when it asked for protection on more than 120 patents it called trade secrets. Waymo had sought a temporary injunction that could have shut down Uber’s work on self-driving cars.
The judge ordered Uber to produce a timeline of events that led to Mr. Levandowski’s hiring and to do what it could to return the files to Waymo.
Quotation of the Day
“They’ve set up a perfect scheme here. It was rigged so there was no way they could lose.”
— Benjamin Poehling, a whistle-blower at UnitedHealth Group, who asserts that the big insurance companies have been systematically bilking Medicare Advantage for years, reaping billions of taxpayer dollars from the program by gaming the payment system.
Coming Up
• JPMorgan Chase shareholders will gather in Wilmington, Del., for the bank’s annual meeting at 10 a.m. Shareholders are likely to be awaiting what Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, will say about the Trump administration’s policies and the economy.
• The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, or SALT, a three-day event for hedge fund managers, will begin in Las Vegas.