Jim Simons is back on top.
For the fifth time in seven years, the 83-year-old founder of quant specialist Renaissance Technologies leads Institutional Investor’s Rich List, the definitive ranking of the highest-earning hedge fund managers.
Simons retook the throne after earning $3.4 billion in 2021, supplanting last year’s leader, Israel “Izzy” Englander. The Millennium Management founder had to settle for second place after he made “only” $3.1 billion in 2021.
Altogether, the 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers earned a combined $26.64 billion last year, the second-highest amount in the history of the Rich List, after only 2020’s record-setting haul.
Over the past two years, the members of the Rich List’s First Team have made more than $58 billion combined.
This year, one had to have earned $260 million just to qualify for the main list. (A Second Team of high earners who didn’t make the top 25 will be published in the coming weeks.)
Eight managers made at least $1 billion last year, with the median earner — Coatue Management’s Philippe Laffont — taking home $800 million despite his hedge fund’s having gained less than 6 percent in 2021.
Just two people qualify for the Rich List for the first time: Karthik Sarma of SRS Investment Management, who cashed in on an outsize stake in Avis Budget Group as its stock surged more than five times in price, and Richard Mashaal of Senvest Management, the top performer on the Rich List, with a better than 85 percent return.
Find out below who else made bank.
$365 Million
The founders of 25-year-old, London-based Marshall Wace topped the Second Team last year, but now they’re back among the top-25 highest earners. Their firm now manages $64 billion in both discretionary and quantitative strategies. Last year, MW Eureka Class A2 gained nearly 10 percent, as Neutral TOPS Class A surged 23.73 percent. At year-end, Marshall Wace made huge bets on several of the most popular tech and internet stocks, more than tripling its stake in Microsoft, quadrupling its holdings in Amazon and Apple, and swelling its investment in Alphabet nearly ninefold. It also increased its position in Meta Platforms — the company formerly known as Facebook — by more than 3,000 percent. The stocks are now the firm’s five largest U.S.-listed long positions.
