Ken Griffin is the richest hedge fund manager in the world as of November 2026, with a net worth we estimate at about $57 billion, roughly double the fortune of anyone else on this list. This ranking covers living founders and principals of hedge funds whose money was made running those funds, measured in U.S. dollars. Proprietary trading shops and inherited fortunes sit outside the ten and are covered under Special mentions.
Hedge funds have a simple pitch: give us your money, we keep 2% a year and 20% of the gains (or far more, at the multi-manager giants). Do that for thirty years at scale, reinvest your own cut in your own fund, and the compounding gets silly. Every name below is proof.
| Rank | Name | Net worth (USD) | Main source of wealth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | John Overdeck | $9.3 billion | Two Sigma |
| 9 | David Shaw | $11 billion | D.E. Shaw & Co. |
| 8 | Chris Hohn | $12 billion | TCI Fund Management |
| 7 | Bill Ackman | $13 billion | Pershing Square |
| 6 | Ray Dalio | $19 billion | Bridgewater Associates |
| 5 | Michael Platt | $21 billion | BlueCrest Capital |
| 4 | Steve Cohen | $26.5 billion | Point72, New York Mets |
| 3 | Israel Englander | $27.5 billion | Millennium Management |
| 2 | David Tepper | $28.5 billion | Appaloosa, Carolina Panthers |
| 1 | Ken Griffin | $57 billion | Citadel, Citadel Securities |
The 10 richest hedge fund managers, counted down
10. John Overdeck: $9.3 billion
Overdeck won a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad as a teenager, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Two Sigma makes money. He worked at D.E. Shaw and Amazon before cofounding the firm in 2001 with David Siegel, and the pair built one of the original data-hungry quant shops: feed enormous amounts of information into models, let the models forecast prices, keep humans away from the buy button.
Two Sigma now manages more than $75 billion. Overdeck and Siegel handed the co-CEO titles to others in 2024 and became co-chairmen, though Overdeck rejoined the management committee in 2025. Siegel’s fortune is a mirror image of his partner’s, which is why he appears below in Special mentions instead of in a tie for this spot.
We value Overdeck on his share of Two Sigma’s management company plus the capital he keeps invested in its funds, roughly $9.3 billion.
9. David Shaw: $11 billion
Before he ran a hedge fund, David Shaw was a computer science professor at Columbia. He left academia for Morgan Stanley, then started D.E. Shaw & Co. in 1988 with the idea that a computer could spot pricing mistakes faster than any trader. The firm became a training ground for people who went on to do other things, including a young vice president named Jeff Bezos, who quit to sell books online.
D.E. Shaw manages over $100 billion today. Shaw himself stepped back from daily operations in 2002 and spends his time as chief scientist at D.E. Shaw Research, which builds custom supercomputers to simulate how proteins move.
His figure, about $11 billion, comes from his ownership of the firm and its fee streams, cross-checked against current wealth estimates.
8. Chris Hohn: $12 billion
Hohn is the son of a Jamaican car mechanic who grew up in Surrey and ended up running one of the best-performing funds in the world from an office in London. His firm, TCI, stands for The Children’s Investment Fund, a name that comes from the charity he set up alongside it: part of the fund’s earnings go to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, whose endowment is above $6 billion.
The investing style is blunt. TCI owns a handful of big, high-quality companies (Microsoft, Visa and GE Aerospace among them) and holds them for years. With about $77 billion under management, it posted the kind of returns in 2025 that put Hohn at or near the top of the industry’s pay rankings, with one estimate at roughly $4.9 billion in personal pay.
Our model puts his net worth at about $12 billion, based on his stake in TCI and the personal capital riding in its funds.
7. Bill Ackman: $13 billion
Ackman made his name with loud bets. He shorted bond insurer MBIA years before the 2008 crisis proved him right, then made a fortune rescuing mall owner General Growth Properties when everyone else was running away. His fund, Pershing Square, launched in 2004 and runs a concentrated portfolio of about ten stocks, with names like Chipotle, Uber and Amazon.
The trade people still talk about came in March 2020, when Ackman spent about $27 million on credit protection and turned it into roughly $2.6 billion within weeks. Pershing Square now manages more than $20 billion, a large share of it in a permanent-capital vehicle listed in London, which means the fees keep coming even when investors get nervous.
Ackman’s $13 billion is built from his ownership of Pershing Square, his personal holdings in its funds, and the market value of the management company.
6. Ray Dalio: $19 billion
Dalio started Bridgewater in 1975 out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York, a few years after Harvard Business School. It grew into the largest hedge fund firm on the planet, known for its Pure Alpha fund, its All Weather strategy and a house culture of radical transparency that Dalio turned into a bestselling book, Principles.
He gave up the CEO job in 2017, retired as co-chief investment officer in 2022, and had sold his full stake in the firm by 2025. That means his fortune is now mostly cash and investments rather than a slice of a company. Bridgewater still manages about $102 billion. Dalio now spends much of his time writing about debt cycles and the rise and fall of nations.
Because Dalio has cashed out of Bridgewater, we value him on the proceeds of those stake sales plus decades of fee income, net of taxes and giving: about $19 billion.
5. Michael Platt: $21 billion
Platt is the British trader who fired his clients. He cofounded BlueCrest in 2000 after almost a decade at JPMorgan, built it into one of Europe’s largest hedge fund firms with more than $35 billion at its peak, and then in 2015 handed outside investors their money back. BlueCrest became a private partnership trading mostly Platt’s own capital and that of his staff.
The move looked odd until the returns came in: about 50% in 2016, 54% in 2017, 95% in 2020 and a reported 153% in 2022. When you keep 100% of the gains on your own billions, those numbers compound fast. Platt, based in Jersey, also collects art, which he shows in a converted church crypt in London.
Our estimate of about $21 billion sits at the upper end of outside estimates, which run as low as the mid-teens. It rests on BlueCrest’s capital base, which is overwhelmingly his own, and its reported returns since it went private.
4. Steve Cohen: $26.5 billion
Cohen is the trader who turned his hobby into a baseball team. A poker player at Wharton, he started his first fund in 1992 with $25 million and became the model for the aggressive, information-obsessed trading firm. Today he runs Point72 Asset Management, which began as his family office in 2014 and opened to outside money in 2018.
In 2020 he paid $2.4 billion for control of the New York Mets, then the most ever spent on a baseball team. His art collection is worth an estimated $1 billion, including a Jeff Koons Rabbit bought for $91.1 million. Point72 had a monster 2025: one estimate had Cohen personally earning about $3.4 billion that year, among the biggest paydays in the industry.
The $26.5 billion figure adds Point72 equity and Cohen’s capital in its funds to the Mets, at their current team value, and the art.
3. Israel Englander: $27.5 billion
Englander is the least famous person in the top five and possibly the most influential. The son of Polish immigrants, he started Millennium Management in 1989 with $35 million, $5 million of it his own, and a partner who left the next year after a rough start.
What he built is the multi-manager model that half of Wall Street now copies. Millennium hands capital to hundreds of independent trading teams, gives more money to those who perform, and cuts those who lose. The firm manages close to $100 billion, employs more than 6,800 people in 18 main offices and makes over 10 million trades on an average day. In 2014 Englander paid $71.3 million for a Park Avenue duplex, a record for a Manhattan co-op at the time.
At 78, his estimated $27.5 billion, a figure outside trackers place anywhere from about $19 billion to $28 billion, comes almost entirely from owning Millennium’s management company and his capital inside its funds.
2. David Tepper: $28.5 billion
Tepper grew up in Pittsburgh, cut his teeth on junk bonds at Goldman Sachs and left in 1992 when he was passed over for partner. He launched Appaloosa Management the next year. His defining moment came in February and March 2009, when he bought beaten-down bank stocks like Bank of America at about $3 a share while the rest of the market was looking for the exit. The fund made about $7 billion, around $4 billion of it for Tepper personally.
He has since turned Appaloosa into something close to a family office, with roughly $17 billion in assets, most of it his. In 2018 he paid about $2.3 billion for the Carolina Panthers, a record for an NFL team at the time, and he added MLS side Charlotte FC with a record expansion fee of about $325 million. He moved the firm to Miami Beach in 2016.
Tepper’s number is the sum of his capital in Appaloosa and his two Charlotte sports teams at today’s franchise values.
1. Ken Griffin: $57 billion
Griffin started trading convertible bonds from his Harvard dorm room in 1987, with a satellite dish on the roof to get live quotes. Three years later he founded Citadel in Chicago with $4.6 million. He was the youngest person on the U.S. rich list by 34.
Today he owns about 80% of Citadel, now based in Miami, and the firm is the most profitable hedge fund ever, with roughly $90 billion in net gains for clients since inception. That alone would put him near the top of this list. His second company, Citadel Securities, is what puts him in a different league: it handles about one in four U.S. stock trades and was valued at $22 billion when it took its first outside money in 2022. Citadel even handed $5 billion of its 2025 profits back to clients and started 2026 with about $67 billion to manage. In September 2026 Griffin gave $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, which the school called the largest single gift ever to an American university.
The valuation adds his 80% of the hedge fund to his controlling stake in Citadel Securities, priced off its last funding round and its earnings since, plus real estate that includes some of the most expensive homes ever sold in the U.S.
Special mentions
- Jeff Yass (about $78 billion): richer than Griffin, but Susquehanna International Group is an options trading and market-making firm, and much of his fortune is a stake in TikTok owner ByteDance. It is not a hedge fund in the usual sense.
- David Siegel (about $9.3 billion): Two Sigma’s other cofounder has a fortune almost identical to John Overdeck’s, so we list the pair once and note Siegel here.
- George Soros (about $8.6 billion): the most famous hedge fund manager alive would rank far higher if he had not moved about $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations. His fund now manages family money only.
What the richest hedge fund managers have in common
- They eat their own cooking. Tepper, Platt and Cohen keep most of their wealth inside their own funds. When a manager’s cut gets reinvested at 20% or 30% a year, the fortune grows faster than the fees.
- Most started young and early. Six of the ten founded their firms before 1995. Being early to quant trading, multi-manager pods or distressed debt mattered more than being first to any single hot idea.
- The biggest fortunes come from owning the machine. Griffin’s lead comes from Citadel Securities, a market maker. Englander’s comes from a structure that runs hundreds of traders at once. Picking stocks well pays; owning the platform pays more.
- Several have shut the door on clients. Platt returned outside money, Dalio cashed out, and Tepper runs mostly his own capital. Past a certain size, other people’s money is more hassle than it is worth.
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Who is the richest hedge fund manager in the world?
Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities, is the richest hedge fund manager as of November 2026. We estimate his net worth at about $57 billion.
How much money does the number 10 hedge fund manager have?
John Overdeck of Two Sigma ranks 10th with about $9.3 billion. His cofounder David Siegel has a nearly identical fortune.
Is Ray Dalio still the richest hedge fund manager?
No. Dalio ranks sixth with about $19 billion. He sold his remaining stake in Bridgewater by 2025, while Griffin, Tepper, Englander and Cohen kept growing their firms.
How do hedge fund managers make billions?
They charge management and performance fees on client money, then reinvest their own share in their funds. The richest also own the management company itself, which can be worth billions on its own.
Who is the richest British hedge fund manager?
Michael Platt of BlueCrest, with about $21 billion, is the richest British hedge fund manager. Chris Hohn of TCI is second with about $12 billion.
Why is Jeff Yass not on the list?
Yass is worth more than Griffin, but his firm Susquehanna is an options trading and market-making business, and a large part of his wealth is a stake in ByteDance. We list him under Special mentions.
How we estimate net worth
Our estimates are based on public reporting, company valuations, and deal and earnings figures all compiled in an internal valuation model. They are approximate, and figures change over time as new information emerges.
Keep reading
- How John Paulson made $19 billion in two years with one trade
- How rich people really invest in stocks
- What a family office is and why billionaires use one
Last updated: November 2026.
