In a Succession-like turn of events, George Soros just ceded control of his empire to his 37-year-old son Alex, surprising those who expected his older brother Jonathan to be heir. The billionaire financier, now 92, built a $25 billion investing enterprise and is known for donating extensively to liberal causes through his Open Society Foundations.
Soros has five children with two wives, of which Alex is the fourth. People close to the matter long anticipated Jonathan, Soros’s third child, to assume his role, including Jonathan himself. However, Jonathan and his father “didn’t get on on certain points,” the elder Soros himself told the Wall Street Journal, without elaborating. Jonathan left the family investment empire in 2011 to start Athletes Unlimited, which operates women’s athletic leagues.
Jonathan’s exit left the heirship open for Alex, who holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has now fully pivoted from playboy to progressive advocate to bona fide hedge fund power player. Alex seemed an unlikely successor a decade ago, when he kept company with a rotating cast of celebrities and filled his social media feed with pictures of roaring parties, but he began associating with heads of state and advocacy leaders in the late Obama years and has now transitioned to helming his father’s $25 billion investing and philanthropy empire.
It’s unclear why the three other Soros children, Robert, Andrea, and Gregory, were not in the succession running. Robert, the eldest, was reported by Page Six to be in a “messy divorce” around 2014 and worked at Soros Fund Management until 2017, when he left to form his own wealth management firm. Andrea, Soros’s only daughter, serves as a board member at Open Society Foundations. And Gregory, the youngest Soros, is a sculptor who prefers to keep a low profile.
Here’s a look back at how Alex Soros, once famous for hosting #CampSoros in the Hamptons, got the corner office.
“I have the incentive of failing my own reputation”
“Chilling at dad’s house in Southampton, drinking 40s while cruising on the family boat, and making out with the babes.” That’s how the New York Times depicted a 2008 blog post from the now-defunct gossip site Cityfile, which had somehow gotten into Alex Soros’s Facebook page.
It was embarrassing for the entire family, Alex told the Times’ Style section in 2012, not least because it was his first entry into public life: “My mom was like, ‘Welcome to being a Soros.’”
Nevertheless, he had been a big name on the New York party scene in the late 2000s, known for hosting lavish parties in the Hamptons with celebrity- and model-studded invite lists. His events often populated the pages of Page Six through the mid-2010s; for instance, see a 2016 report of him “shuttling models” to Villa Maria, the $72 million Hamptons mansion of late shoe designer Vince Camuto. Parties at the villa included “lobster bakes, games of drunken hide-and-seek, bottles of rosé.”
At the time, he was a silent presence at his father’s firm. “Alex used to come to board meetings, but he hardly spoke,” Aryeh Neier, Open Society Foundations’ former president, told the Wall Street Journal.
Alex posted prolifically on Instagram, showing himself hanging out with the likes of music mogul Scooter Braun, basketball star Joakim Noah, and model Chanel Iman (his ex-girlfriend). Celebrities and socialites often posted from his Hamptons events with the caption #CampSoros. In 2016, Page Six reported that Alex enlisted promoter Adam Spoont to recruit ranks of models for his summer social calendar. At that same time, Alex was pursuing his Ph.D. in history from UC Berkeley, enrolling in 2010 and graduating in 2018.
But in 2012, as Alex told the Times, he started wanting to shed his scenester scion reputation. He said he was shocked at the nepo-playboy “caricature” that often ran in the press.
“I have the incentive of failing my own reputation,” he told the Times. “If I don’t succeed, then I’m just another deadbeat lazy trust-fund kid.”
While Alex still entertained prolifically and maintained his celebrity ties, in his thirties his Instagram became increasingly populated with world leaders and high-profile liberal politicians. In 2021, he posed at the Capitol Building with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom he referred to as his “good friend” in the caption.
Alex also became more involved in the family empire in recent years, stepping in for the elder Soros on visits to the company’s worldwide offices and serving as chairman of Open Society Foundations since December. With his new appointment, he will also direct Democracy PAC, the Soros super PAC.
Alex became more dedicated to philanthropic work, founding the Alexander Soros foundation for social justice grants in 2012. He often donates to voting rights and gender equity groups. To be sure, few people are as political as his father, whose huge donations to liberal causes have made him the target of numerous right-wing conspiracy theories—and even terrifyingly resulted in a bomb being mailed to his house in Chappaqua in 2018. Still, Alex told the Journal this week that he was “more political” than his father, and intends to keep pumping money to the left “as long as the other side is doing it.”
“He’s earned it,” Soros said of his successor.
Soros Fund Management did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
