America’s Most Successful Immigrants

George Soros

George Soros was born in Hungary and came to the United States when he got a job as an arbitrage trader for F.M. Mayer. George went to the London School of Economics and received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in philosophy from this school. George moved from F.M. Mayer to Wertheim & Co. where he saved up $500,000.

Eventually, he started Soros Fund Management in the 1970s. He once made $1 billion by a short sale of $10 billion US worth of pound sterling during the Black Wednesday UK currency crisis. He is known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” and is worth $29.4 billion.

Soro’s Controversies

Soros was investigated for insider trading when he knew about a group of investors that were going to take over the Societe Generale in France. The laws about insider trading at that time were not so clear and it was hard to establish that a crime had been committed so no charges were brought against him.

Soros was later convicted in 2005 by the Court of Appeals in France, and the penalty was upheld by the French Supreme Court who reduced the penalty to 940,000 Euros. In 2003, The Washington Post interviewed Soros who said that him trying to remove George W. Bush from office was “a matter of life and death” and the “central focus of my life.” He gave money to groups that tried to get Bush out of the White House.