Orville Schell

WHEN ONE JANUARY MORNING IN 2021 headlines around the world announced that the Chinese corporation Hainan Airlines Holding Co., Ltd. had gone bankrupt,¹ I found myself reliving a visit to this very company with George Soros in 2005. Soros was interested in this upstart private airline as an investor rather than as a philanthropist, and so we found ourselves bound for the island province of Hainan in China’s far south.

Soros had become interested in China during the mid-1980s after being involved in bringing a group of reform-minded Hungarian economists—who as he put it “were greatly admired in the Communist world”²—to the People’s Republic of China. His China Fund was set up in 1986 under the patronage of Chen Yizi, director of the Research Institute for the Reform of the Economic Structure, a government-sponsored Chinese think tank established during the tenure of liberal Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang.³ Although Soros shut it down in early 1989, after false allegations of connections to the CIA were lofted, some projects were nonetheless allowed to continue, and from time to time he was still able to travel to China. However, he came under ever-closer scrutiny after General Secretary Hu Jintao attended the 2005 Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, and was reportedly warned (falsely) by President Vladimir Putin of Russia that Soros and his foundations had almost single-handedly fomented the so-called color revolutions—the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan—that had recently shaken these former Soviet republics. Putin was said to have warned Hu that China, too, should be very wary of Soros’s activities.

Putin’s warning notwithstanding, these were years when China’s leaders were interested in almost any foreign investment, even from the likes of “the crocodile,” as Soros had been dubbed in China because of his presumed ruthlessness as an investor. He was thus allowed to continue to make occasional trips, as long as his activities were ostensibly focused on business and finance. During these years he met with state-run think tank economists and officials from the China Investment Corporation, China’s sovereign wealth fund (which was just organizing itself), as well entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma (Alibaba), Edward Tian (AsianInfo Technologies), and Chauncey Shey (SB China Venture Capital), ostensibly to explore investment opportunities. But at the same time, Soros also availed himself of every opportunity to meet with representatives of civil society organizations and to sound out officials about their appetite for engaging with his foundations on relatively unsensitive topics, such as the rule of law, the environment, and academic exchange.

I accompanied Soros on some of these trips, and so I was able to observe his involvement in China’s development boom and how he managed to fit together his own bifurcated life as both a businessman and a philanthropist. But I also became aware of another distinguishing feature of the larger universe that George Soros inhabited: the immense galaxy of people swirling around him who helped irrigate his own life with an ongoing sense of intellectual purpose as a global actor. While some of these people came from the world of business and profit, most of them came from the second side of his life, where Soros gave away the money he’d earned to promote open societies.

The truth was that in his philanthropic life Soros had by the first decade of this century become a catalytic force that would give any one-party state cause to worry. For he had woven a web of interlocking foundations and people that stretched around the world like a string of personal embassies, funding programs dedicated to free speech, legal reform, environmental justice, freedom of assembly, and universal human rights with hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Collectively these programs had made him as famous as a foe of autocracy as he was for being a successful investor. Needless to say, his reputation as the Johnny Appleseed of the notion of “open society” did not endear him with hardliners in the Chinese Communist Party, or any other authoritarian regime for that matter. Ultimately he would be considered so “unfriendly” in Beijing that party leaders would refuse to issue him any kind of visa at all.

But in 2005 these restrictions still lay in the future. As our plane—a corporate jet from China’s first private charter company, Deer Jet—drifted down through the fluffy tropical clouds over the palm-fringed coastline of Hainan, I marveled at the anomaly of a US hedge fund mogul being feted by a billionaire entrepreneur in this country that had once pilloried their ilk as “capitalist roaders” and “counter-revolutionaries.” We were heading to Haikou, the provincial capital, to visit Chen Feng, the founder and chairman of Hainan Airlines, China’s largest private air carrier. Soros had already invested in the company, making him its largest outside investor, and Chen was now courting him to put in a second round. But it was not just investment capital that Chen wanted. He also wanted the cachet of someone like Soros to lure other investors to the firm.

As our plane set down at Haikou Meilan International Airport, everyone in Soros’s party felt they were on an adventure. After all, we were about to be admitted into a world that normally was sealed off from the prying eyes of outsiders. What is more, this southern island province was far from Beijing and well known for its unrestrained economic development. Chen Feng would tell us of having been involved in his own share of dubious activities, some of which sounded almost mafia-like. But, as the age-old Chinese expression put it, “The mountains are high and the emperor far away” (山高皇帝远). With Beijing’s controlling hand far away and Hainanese entrepreneurs and officials often in league with each other on ambitious development projects (usually involving land and bank loans, two key aspects of China’s madcap economic boom), some unprecedented, not to say unholy, dealmaking had been going on and Hainan’s cowboy communist capitalists had ended up creating some surprising new companies. Chen Feng’s Hainan Airlines was just one of the best known examples of the kind of boomtown economic development that was making the island province an epicenter of go-go entrepreneurial energy, if also of questionable business practices.

But how could it have been otherwise? In a country where there were still no private property rights, where all land was controlled by low-paid local government officials, and where loan making was largely in the hands of only slightly better-paid state bankers, deal-making was an endless series of invitations for embezzlement and kickbacks.

As we stepped off our private jet (Deer Jet was also owned by Chen Feng) into the steam-room-like tropical air of Hainan, we were met by a bevy of smiling young women with ruby-red lips, each bearing a bouquet of obscenely exotic flowers. Then, like the entourage of a visiting potentate, we were squired to a cortege of awaiting black limousines, delivered to Chen’s seaside estate, and installed in his opulent neighboring guest house.

At the appointed time came an audience with Chen himself. After greeting us effusively at the door of his home, instead of regaling us with the success and virtues of his airline or numerous other business ventures, he instead began telling us about his interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Then, with evident pride, he led us on a tour of the upstairs meditation room he’d built especially for his spiritual practice. It was here before a lovely Buddha image that he meditated, studied with his in-house Tibetan lama, and thought through the corpus of the crypto-Buddhist corporate kultur that Hainan Airways employees were encouraged “to study (学习).” Indeed, he’d made it easy for them by printing a special tasseled bookmark-like card emblazoned with condensed prescriptions for how his version of Buddhist teachings could lead to a more successful corporate culture. What is more, he was in the process of writing a tract on the seminal role of Buddhist self-cultivation in Chinese civilization. After this two volume opus, Lifetime Cultivation of Body and Soul, was finally finished, he calligraphed it with a traditional writing brush and inkstone (his calligraphy was not bad), self-published it in a traditional thread-bound (线装本) Chinese edition, and distributed it to friends and colleagues. When he presented me with a signed copy several years later, he seemed as proud of this work as of his airline.

As I watched Soros gaze around Chen’s meditation chamber, it occurred to me that, despite the fact that he was not religious, there was an interesting parallel between him and this fellow Chinese mogul. Both were successful capitalists and very rich men, but each seemed to find his life as a businessman and his growing wealth insufficient recompense and was reaching for some deeper meaning and nourishment, whether spiritual or intellectual, to complement his obvious material success. Soros had long sought to express himself as a philosopher and as a theoretical economist. Chen was evidently seeking deeper meaning through his study of Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice.

In truth, Soros had never found that trading stocks and bonds or running a hedge fund completely fulfilled his life’s expectations, and he’d always aspired to a more complete intellectual, if not spiritual, life. In his early years after leaving Hungary for London, he’d spent endless hours writing philosophical treatises, most of which were never published. Ever since, he has been a wistful philosopher manqué, someone who has craved the idea of being in a larger discussion with some pantheon of philosopher kings.

“I would have liked to be a philosopher,” he once honestly declared in an interview.⁴ This sense of being incomplete as just a businessman has been a leitmotif in the arc of Soros’s life.

“The big difference between my business life and my foundation life is that in the latter I was genuinely engaged,” he admitted to his biographer Michael Kaufman. He went on to declare that if he had a heart attack doing business, he’d consider himself “really a loser.” However, “if I got shot doing something in Russia or China, I wouldn’t have that feeling.”⁵ Having been largely shut out from being able to work toward a more open society in China, he’d now turned, and not unenthusiastically, to business. After all, both fields of endeavor gave him a privileged view into what was happening in this dynamic, unpredictable, but very consequential country.

Most people have come to know Soros on one side or the other of the trader/investor – philosopher/philanthropist divide that has represented the distinguishing poles of his epic life. By being able to follow his experiences dealing with the People’s Republic of China, I’ve been able not only to see how his views on that important country have evolved, but also to understand better how these multiple parts of his divided personality actually fit together, and how he has used his wealth to create a unifying global commons.

On our first night in Hainan, Chen Feng had assembled members of the elite Golden Ding Club (金鼎俱乐部) in Soros’s honor. (A ding [鼎] is a form of an ancient bronze wine vessel used for ceremonial and ritual purposes.) Chen’s club consisted of some of China’s most successful private entrepreneurs who rallied together from time to time to banquet, bond, and share their collective experiences as capitalists living and working within the context of a “socialist society” and a Leninist one-party state. At the dinner Soros was called on to make some remarks, not so much because he had anything relevant to tell this gathering of self-made Chinese titans, but because Chen knew that his guest was a “get,” and whatever Soros said would serve as a benediction on his own rapidly expanding airline group.

As guest of honor, Soros was seated beside his beaming host at an enormous round table. He seemed to be enjoying the idea of having been granted entrance to this sanctum sanctorum of Chinese entrepreneurial energy. Many international businessmen might have seen the occasion as an irresistible opportunity to expand their “guanxi network” (关系网), those webs of personal relationships upon which Chinese dealmaking so often depends: collecting new name cards and making new deals. But Soros viewed the dinner more as an opportunity to understand the subterranean forces at play inside China, which were rapidly changing the country in ways that outsiders often had great difficulty seeing and understanding.

I was seated next to one of China’s largest private manufacturers of motorbikes, whose company was situated in Sichuan Province. In spite of the fact that he had been pilloried and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and that his distinctly capitalist enterprise had been forced to grow inside a socialist state cage, this man evinced optimism about the future of his business. For to help drive China’s economy forward and maintain high growth rates, the Chinese Communist Party still needed privateers like him. And despite the fact that many of them had generated distinctly un-communist amounts of personal wealth (and economic power), the party still admiringly referred to them as “national champions” (全国冠军) and they continued to be able to operate relatively freely within the otherwise often rigid confines of the Chinese state. Hainan Airways was in many ways a poster child for all the other private enterprises represented around the Golden Ding Club banquet table. Collectively they were not only supercharging China’s economy with new energy, but also lending luster to China as a global trade powerhouse.

It was a heady time just then in China. Many of these dinner guests had concluded that the Chinese Communist Party was likely to allow private companies like theirs to continue to expand and prosper, and even compete with the state-owned enterprises that had comprised the heart of the Chinese economy since 1949. The private firms were outperforming most state-owned enterprises, and it was not farfetched to think that the companies represented by the Golden Ding Club might even replace them one day. This scenario beguiled those Americans who still hoped that greater “engagement” would lead China to continue reforming and opening up. Soros himself had always been intrigued by this vision, which had, after all, been at the heart of the logic of his philanthropy as the communist world broke up after 1989. And because he felt that the businessmen gathered together in Hainan were living evidence that such reform-minded change had happened and was still possible, sitting around this banquet allowed all of us in Soros’s small traveling party to feel that we were very much in the right place, with the right people, at the right moment.

And indeed, before our private jet whisked us away from Chen Feng and Hainan, Soros had ponied up another round of investment for his airline.

“It’s a fine company, and I don’t have enough exposure in China,” a smiling Soros told the press.⁶

In retrospect we were perhaps somewhat naive in believing that the promise of reform justified looking toward the future with such hopefulness. Although Soros’s Open Society Institute still had a few lingering philanthropic projects continuing in China, the party was increasingly ambivalent about civil society, particularly foreign funding for its domestic NGOs. With Soros’s foundation banished, and he as its progenitor viewed by the party with growing ambivalence, there was no longer much promise for his “open society” evangelism in China. So, with his civil society wings clipped, why not do a little business? After all, China was in an exciting period of economic development, and Soros wanted to keep his front-row seat as the drama unfolded. And Hainan Airlines was one of the most dynamic players in this always surprising drama.

After having started in 1993 with a single plane, by the time we arrived in 2005 Hainan Airlines was China’s largest private passenger carrier and was destined to become the fourth-largest airline in the country. For Chen Feng, a private businessman struggling in a system where almost all enterprises in the transport, media, telecommunications, and banking sectors were still state-owned, this was no small accomplishment. As his ambitions grew, the Hainan Airlines Group became one of a rapidly expanding number of multinational Chinese conglomerates gaining a global name for itself. But often the growth of these companies was so rapid, chaotic, and sometimes lawless and distorted by government interference and patronage that it was difficult, especially for foreigners, to evaluate them and then to know just how their investments might end up being used.

With their high-rise headquarters and slick promotional materials, companies like Hainan Airlines certainly radiated an air of dynamism and success. But their reality was often far different. These companies were almost always encumbered by hidden “Chinese characteristics” (中国特色) that made them very different animals from their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Many of these new Chinese enterprises lacked transparency, had dodgy governance structures, were plagued by murky ownership, were overdependent on their founders, and were subject to the whims of the party and its leaders. Even more important, their success or failure was invariably dependent on their relationships with government leaders and the state-owned bank chieftains who provided most of the available investment capital in China, where financial markets were still weak. And then there was the reality that whenever a private company wanted to expand, the CEO needed to have good contacts with local officials, because all property, permitting procedures, and lending institutions were state-controlled. Such market-distorting dependencies made corruption almost inevitable. Foreign investors undertaking due diligence were left peering through a glass darkly.

As Soros would only belatedly understand, his investments in Hainan Airlines were ascribed to a less profitable part of the larger HNA Group, so that even as the airline prospered, he ended up getting poor returns. This Chinese legerdemain and lack of transparency often left foreign investors at the mercy of a system that was opaque and unfathomable. Each case was too often just a variation on a theme: An overseas investor would initially be shown enormous deference by being feted with a degree of pomp and ceremony that would lead him to conclude that he had somehow managed to bridge the difficult divide separating the two worlds that the Chinese demarcate as “inside the country” (国内) and “outside the country” (国外). Transactions considered “inside” between Chinese players are those where everyone more or less understands how things work because they’ve been living “inside the country” their whole lives. But matters pertaining to emissaries from “outside the country”—such as joint-venture business deals with foreigners—are subject to a different set of protocols and rituals that hark back to the dynastic days of “barbarian management,” when outsiders were plied with ritual and ceremony designed to keep them at bay with flattery. Such indirect strategies of stealth and deception were far less costly and more effective management tools than brute force.

In an investment or joint venture involving foreigners, the preliminary wooing is often as elaborate as any ardent personal courtship. It may involve private jets, exotic bouquets, extravagant gifts, luxurious guest houses, tours of meditation rooms, seats of honor at elaborate banquets, and other blandishments that leave a guest of honor feeling nonpareil. But once the deal is done, the money has been transferred, and there is no longer any possibility of retreat, the “foreigner friend” often finds himself quietly shunted onto a siding and to confront opacity, where it’s easier for the Chinese partner to quietly relieve said “friend” of his company’s intellectual property, make his investment vanish down the Chinese rabbit hole, or otherwise fleece him.

Soros was not, of course, unaware of the refractory nature of totalitarian states, whose signature is secrecy and paranoia. After all, as a youth he’d lived through both the Nazis and then the advent of communist rule in his native Hungary. And yet, despite the skepticism born from this experience about one-party governments (much less the likelihood of them ever voluntarily relinquishing unilateral state control), Soros nonetheless tried to maintain a fundamentally optimistic attitude about China. This had enabled him to continue hoping that his activities as a philanthropist might help bend the metal of Chinese authoritarianism. Part of his optimism derived from his abiding belief in the tonic effect of liberal democracies: that if they made an effort to engage with regimes like the People’s Republic of China through business, trade, civil society interactions, academic exchanges, and philanthropic activities, they might have a salutary effect. This was the dream of “engagement” that had been set in motion by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s game-changing trip to Beijing in 1972, when they’d met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, agreed on an anti-USSR strategy, and transformed the Cold War global order. And even after Soros’s repeated failures in other formerly communist countries—most monumentally in Russia and then in China—he seemed unfazed. Indeed, the idea that he might still somehow help facilitate a peaceful transition from autocracy to a more democratic form of government remained his dream. Surprisingly his expulsion from numerous communist countries has led to no regrets and has precipitated no apologies. As he bluntly put it in an article entitled “A Selfish Man with a Selfless Foundation,” his life had taught him to “believe that in philanthropy one should do the right thing whether or not it succeeds.”⁷

“It’s a very cultured way of influencing people,” observed fellow Hungarian investor György Jaksity. “You can say, ‘I am Napoleon Bonaparte—I will kill thousands of people unless you give me Moscow.’ Or there’s the other way, the Soros way.”⁸

Traveling with Soros in China over the years, I was always amazed by how, even after repeated rebukes and setbacks, he kept his equanimity, kept going, and kept spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the hope of encouraging the “better angels” of various refractory countries to evolve in a more open, just, and humane direction. The dream that China, even if the Communist Party stayed in power, might also evolve away from its Maoist roots endured during the first decade of the 2000s. The hope—for Soros and others—was that if the United States and other liberal democracies were patient and provided encouragement and financial support, the gap between authoritarian China and the democratic world would slowly narrow. China might not immediately emerge as a full-blown democracy, but it might develop in a progressively more open direction. Such faith was characterized by the former World Bank president Robert Zoellick when he hopefully suggested in 2005 (the same year we went to Hainan) that China might yet end up a “responsible stakeholder” in the world order.⁹

Just such a convergence seemed to promise itself during the ensuing decade, when the Chinese Communist Party launched its so-called “going out” (走出去) policy and began encouraging both private and state-owned enterprises to leverage themselves with capital from state-owned banks and acquire companies and investments abroad. Chen Feng was one of those entrepreneurs who took this bit in his teeth and went on a madcap, global buying spree. Like so many other ambitious private Chinese entrepreneurs who were fueled by seemingly inexhaustible supplies of state capital, he began hoovering up assets around the world. Hainan soon had stakes in Hilton Hotels and Resorts, Deutsche Bank, Swissport, Ingram Micro, and hundreds of other global assets. By 2017, HNA Group ranked no. 170 in the Fortune Global 500 list.¹⁰ And by endowing Hainan Airways with his valuable global investment cachet early on, George Soros contributed to getting this enormous Chinese snowball rolling. “Soros’ investment clearly shows that Hainan Airlines’ performance is outstanding, on a par with international airlines,” Chen had proudly proclaimed shortly after our visit.¹¹

By January 2021, Hainan Airlines had grown to have some 220 aircraft and 290,000 employees, and its parent, the Haihang Group, owned more than 2,300 other businesses around the world, including stakes in fourteen other global airlines with some 900 planes!

But then, after its spree of debt-fueled acquisitions both home and abroad, it was suddenly revealed that the company was not only going bankrupt, but its executives stood accused of embezzling $10 billion in assets. Hainan Airlines was, it turned out, still something of a poster child for Chinese private enterprise. However, instead of being a model of responsible Buddhist business practices and corporate shareholder value, by then it had become a symbol of overreach, hubris, corruption, and failure.

The full eclipse of the promise of engagement came after the investiture of Xi Jinping as general secretary and president, as he made it increasingly evident that China was no longer on a reformist, liberalizing trajectory. What is more, Xi was coming to view the ballooning independent economic power of private moguls like Chen Feng, Jack Ma, and Wang Jianlin as potential political threats. And once in office he began reining in some of them while at the same time initiating a host of quasi neo-Maoist campaigns and controls: he promulgated a new “civil society law” in 2016, the Overseas Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Law, that circumscribed foreign NGO collaboration with Chinese counterparts; detained many of the country’s human rights lawyers in 2017; canceled term limits for presidency in 2018; began expelling members of the foreign press corps; also unleashed an era of belligerent “wolf warrior diplomacy” (战狼外交) in 2020, and promulgated the sweeping Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law that spelled out how China can retaliate against those who sanction, or even advocate for sanctions, against China.¹² In serial fashion such belligerence antagonized one country after another that had once been favorably disposed to it. Norway, Korea, Sweden, the Philippines, Canada, Australia, India, and then even the European Union have all been vindictively punished by Beijing for refusing to yield to Chinese threats of retaliation for perceived slights and criticisms.

As Xi’s tenure evinced ever more autocratic tendencies, Soros’s attitude began shifting as well. He seemed to conclude that his efforts had not, in fact, bent any Chinese metal, and with increasing frequency he began speaking of China as a growing threat, a “mortal danger” to the liberal democratic world.¹³

During the earlier halcyon period when “engagement” still possessed an almost alchemical promise among policy makers of being able to promote “convergence,” there was a logic for Soros, and others, to continue supporting collaborative activities in China, whether through business or civil society interactions. But with the advent of Xi’s hardline policies, this logic vanished, and in Soros’s own evolution, the earlier version of him as the implacable opponent of “closed societies” began to reemerge and take ascendancy over Soros the hopeful reformer. In his 2019 and 2020 speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he described this very different China, one that under Xi had evolved from being a “strategic competitor” to one that was becoming a genuine threat, particularly in the world of technology. China had, Soros unambiguously declared, become “the most dangerous opponent of open societies” in the world today.¹⁴

As far as the Chinese Communist Party was concerned, Soros had returned irrevocably to his roots. He was now unambiguously opposed to authoritarianism and resolutely in support of open society. He has not visited China since 2014.

I FIRST MET George Soros long ago, when he became involved in setting up Helsinki Watch and Human Rights Watch with my father, Orville Schell Jr., and Robert Bernstein, then the CEO of Random House. Soros had also been associated with my mother when both became critical of American policy during the Vietnam War and worked on some common projects together. But it was not until the 1990s—when my Chinese-born wife, Baifang Schell, began accompanying Aryeh Neier, the president of Soros’s Open Society Institute, to China and then also began helping Soros on his own trips there—that I got to know him better.

As I have watched Soros over the past few decades, I have come to see that besides his urge to make money and his quest to have an impact as a philanthropist, there was another aspect of him as public citizen that had previously eluded me. His foundations were not just a way for him to advance those causes he cared about, but also a way to nourish his intellect and soul from the world of ideas. What became evident was that whether he was doing business or engaging civil society, he was also weaving together another important part of his life, a unique fabric of people that help sustain him as a thinking activist person.

By helping set up the Golden Ding Club as a fraternity of private entrepreneurs, Chen Feng had created an alternative capitalist chamber of commerce within China’s socialist state as a support mechanism for his own business fraternity. But Soros had done something even more creative and rewarding: he had used his considerable wealth to help others while also helping himself by establishing a global community that afforded him the ability to interact with a broad network of scholars, diplomats, university presidents, government officials, filmmakers, writers, artists, journalists, activists, and sundry others whose work interested him. He has referred to this growing community of people and institutions as his “network of networks.”¹⁵ But as he also began consorting with this growing nebula of people in a more direct and regular way, he found it so congenial that he began intellectually, and sometimes physically, to live in it.

While the web of networks was global, it came to life in miniature cell-like form through the meetings that Soros and his wife, Tamiko, tirelessly convened over lunches and dinners in their New York City apartment, long weekends at their houses in Southampton and Bedford, work trips to their townhouse in London, Thanksgiving celebrations at Central European University in Budapest, winter retreats in the Bahamas, and numerous more public get-togethers and conferences. Each gathering was irrigated by the many tributaries feeding Soros’s networks, whose headwaters all rose in the activities that composed his enormously diverse life. And as these tributaries fed into these intimate salon-like gatherings, they slowly formed a greater body of interconnected, interesting, and politically active people whose portfolios ranged from finance, banking, and investment to world affairs, revolution, election reform, technology, democracy, human rights, and even drug use, education, and palliative care. Many had, of course, been directly or indirectly nourished by one of Soros’s philanthropic programs. But then, often without quite realizing what was happening, these recipients found themselves becoming enmeshed in this larger Soros network and being able to offer their benefactor some recompense. While he nourished supplicants with financial support they, in turn, nourished him and his insatiable appetite to learn by sharing their knowledge and work. As convener in chief, Soros has constructed a feedback loop that has given him the incomparable benefit of being able to learn from and interact with his own grantees. And as part of this unspoken reciprocal compact, participants and guests not only get to interact with him and other guests, but are also offered the opportunity to forge new partnerships with these others in ways that only expanded their progenitor’s vaunted “network of networks.”

“I regard altruism and philanthropy not as a duty, but as a pleasure and a source of satisfaction,” Soros wrote in his book In Defense of Open Society. “It gives me a great sense of satisfaction to be engaged in an activity for which it would be worth dying.”¹⁶

Being invited to one of Soros’s meals, weekends, vacations, or conferences—even a phone discussion or Zoom meeting—is for many like getting a summons from a head of state. Indeed, if (as some who know him have joked) he is something like a head of state, he is perhaps better described as the head of a “stateless state” that nonetheless has its own foreign policy and embassies around the world. And an invitation to one of his weekend retreats is like being handed a ticket for a cruise on a small but very well-run ship open only to the most interesting and accomplished list of passengers. But unlike a cruise ship, the Good Ship Soros has no slot machines, floor shows, stand-up comics, or lounge acts. Instead its entertainment features discussions about genocide, American politics, the global order, human rights abuses, climate change, pandemics, and the occasional film (usually a documentary). It is not everyone’s version of recreational fun, but for Soros and his acolytes it fits the bill.

Once on board one of these land-locked cruises, except for a possible jog, bike ride, or stroll on the beach, most guests never leave the confines of Soros’s all-encompassing estate compounds, especially El Mirador, in Southampton. And why should they, when everything—tennis, swimming, films, patio lounging, chess and backgammon, meals cooked by his team of gourmet chefs, more films, and nonstop intellectual content—is provided within?

Even as urgent global affairs are discussed, the outside world can feel a little more tractable and time within even seems to slow down. Once in the embrace of a Soros sojourn, one has the childlike sensation of having passed through a portal into a secret garden, a sheltered, privileged preserve that offers a reassuring sense that here, at least, things still work, people still make sense, and the world still coheres. The quiet, well-manicured gardens, verdant lawns, arching trees, delicious food, and conversations with well-informed people create a welcome sense of respite from the craven world outside. And yes, perhaps it is all just an expensive illusion, an elaborate form of conjury that only wealth can create, like looking into a Fabergé egg. But however one construes it, there is no denying that such weekends offer entrants a welcome interlude of surcease from the travails of life outside.

Usually there are ten or so guests in residence at a time, and it’s always a surprise to learn who will show up on a particular invitation list. Making sure that the guests all fit together and enjoy one another’s company is a board game at which Tamiko has become the tireless grand master, even as George remains the unifying presence.

At El Mirador, each day starts with a casual breakfast set outside on a well-provisioned patio table where copies of The New York Times and Financial Times are at the ready. Thereafter guests are left to go about their own affairs, as does Soros, and there is no further collective activity until luncheon time. Then an elegant buffet is set up at the pool house, and guests sit at tables arrayed along a patio under the spreading boughs of enormous shade trees. Like Soros himself, house guests usually come barefoot and dressed in the most casual manner. (Outside guests are invariably dressed with a little more smartness.) But Soros’s own informality gives everyone else permission to relax, let their hair down, and linger in casual discussion over coffee long after the luncheon dishes have been cleared. Then guests repair to their rooms to nap, work, talk on the phone, or read.

Not until 7 P.M. do guests reconvene, this time for cocktails, usually with a few outsiders who have also been invited for dinner. It is at these evening meals where guests get a chance to exchange experiences and ideas with Soros and one another. However, as Soros’s hearing has declined and he found himself less able to participate fully in the conversation, a single large dinner table became unworkable and so guests now sit in smaller groups situated at smaller tables. At Soros’s own table, each place is equipped with a microphone that allows him to hear clearly, through an earpiece, what his tablemates are saying and thereby to join fully in the discussion. Guests must get used to pressing a button on their microphone stands before speaking, but Soros evinces no apology for this system’s awkwardness. What matters is that it works and that he is able to continue participating fully in all interactions with his guests, almost as if there were no impediment at all.

During the COVID pandemic, when everyone was confined to their homes, there was an interruption to this regimen. But Soros was paradoxically less inconvenienced by the challenges of engaging in conversations over Zoom or Signal. In fact, he was at no greater disadvantage because of his hearing loss than anyone else. So, instead of spending weekends with guests at one of his estates, his collegium simply moved online, where he was easily able to electronically stay in touch.

Uninitiates at Soros weekends often consider the table at which he sits as the “important table,” or at least as primus inter pares, and they have sometimes been left smarting when they find themselves parked at a table populated by the spouses and children of the worthies who are engaged in animated debate with his eminence. But they soon learn that seating charts shift night by night and there is reprieve at ensuing dinners.

It is undeniably true that such house parties are dependent on Soros’s seemingly infinite wealth and considerable global standing. But their uniqueness also depends on his own very special sensibility. Many other billionaires put their fortunes to far baser purposes, too often calculated to simply impress others. But never in all the years I’ve enjoyed Soros’s gatherings have I ever felt that his affluence was being deployed in a way that was designed to announce itself or calculated to impress or intimidate. Instead he arrays his wealth in an understated way, with the aspiration of generating a full and free exchange of ideas centering on issues that interest and concern him. Because he takes deep pleasure in interacting with his guests, he does this not simply to please them, but to please himself. That his guests happen to include some of the most brilliant, accomplished, and engaged people on the planet only makes the experience more rewarding for him and for them.

Soros’s aspiration is the same as that of great universities—namely, to create an open academic fraternity where wide-ranging discourse can take place. This is perhaps one of the reasons why he also created and endowed a whole new university, Central European University, that specializes in addressing real-world problems in a practical way. Soros calls CEU “a university that takes its principles and its social responsibilities seriously.”¹⁷

Soros likes thinkers who are also doers, and so academic jargon, repetition of turgid theories, and the incantation of behavioral science mumbo-jumbo are not the currency of his realm. Instead, his focus is on understanding how a global problem arose and how it can best be ameliorated.

Yes, Soros reigns over his dominion of networks like a latter-day sovereign, with Tamiko as his consort and his system of foundation offices arrayed around the world like his own legations. And yet despite his dominion, he is disinclined to dominate discussions. He has strong views and can sometimes be arbitrary in his decision-making, even make mistakes, but he is a good listener who seems to have concluded that the best pathway to continued learning is to be open to what others have to say.

One of my sons has described a stay at Chateau Soros as a little like being summoned to the court of Louis XIV. However, he adds, “whereas what counted in Bourbon France was aristocratic rank, how one dressed, and what jewelry one could boast, at the Soros court what matters is how interesting and au courant one can be.” He added that there is sometimes such pressure to produce scintillating contributions that at dinner some conversations “become like a competitive sport.” There is a bit of Downton Abbey or Brideshead Revisited here, except that Soros’s guests don’t dress that well for dinner, with the host usually presiding in an open floral shirt.

It would be easy to write off such a lifestyle as upper-class self-indulgence, except for the fact that Soros has given away more than $30 billion of his own money, and both the financial beneficiaries and most of those on his guest lists come from much more modest circumstances than he. While wealthy business associates do sometimes stray into his fold, the lion’s share of Soros’s guests work for environmental organizations, governments, multinational organizations, universities, civic groups, think tanks, the media, or cultural organizations. And while he himself wants for nothing, he is one of the few billionaires who has not indulged himself in a private plane, a luxury yacht, a chic vineyard, or similar pretentious affectations favored by others among the super-rich.

But what should one make of the grander events, such as his epic-scale wedding to Tamiko Bolton in 2013 or his equally grand occasional tented birthday parties? Seen from one perspective, these extravaganzas are over the top. Does anyone need to assemble many hundreds of people in enormous tents and spend a million dollars just to celebrate a birthday?

Here, too, though, there is method in the seeming excess. While these large events are costly, they do serve the important role of collectively rallying the bigger dramatis personae from Soros’s diverse, larger-than-life web of networks. These big-tent events are a chance for orbiting members from his many worlds to get connected to Soros Central and become a more organic part of his larger enterprise, even though they may have only joined a lunch, dinner, or weekend at one of his houses.

As a whole, Soros’s various gatherings play an important role in integrating his network of networks and helping his acolytes, friends, and associates feel like members of a larger society of fellows. And such a sense of solidarity helps fortify these global civil society members almost as much as his financial support itself. For what propels Soros’s collective civil society enterprise forward is not just his funding, but his ability to make his recipients feel they are part of a unique, collective global effort. One might even call it a movement. And as the solutions to an increasing number of contemporary problems turn out to be global in scope, such an integrative force is precisely what such diverse and often isolated open society institutions and leaders need to feel connected.

Soros has devised a way of making the process of spreading his money generously around the world also nourish and inspire him with new thinking. In this process he is doubtless answering a need that has smoldered within him since his youth: to be more than just a businessman, to be someone actively engaged in the broad world of ideas, philosophy, and politics. As I have watched the great whirlpool of global actors that he’s managed to set spinning around him, I have often had the sense that it is precisely the intellectual and political excitement they generate that has helped him keep not just up-to-date, but inspired and active, even as he enters his tenth decade.

Proud of his own economic theory of “reflexivity,” Soros has unconsciously managed to put it into practice in his own life. His economic theory presupposes that “if investors believe that markets are efficient, then that belief will change the way they invest, which will in turn change the behavior of the markets in which they are participating.”¹⁸ By building this network of networks, he hopes to change the world’s behavior, and in the process enhance his own ongoing learning and evolution.

“In the course of my life, I have developed a conceptual framework which has helped me both to make money as a hedge fund manager and to spend money as a policy-oriented philanthropist,” he cheerfully wrote in the Financial Times in 2009. “But the framework itself is not about money, it is about the relationship between thinking and reality, a subject that has been extensively studied by philosophers from early on.” In a word, he adds, reflexivity postulates that “participants’ views influence the course of events, and the course of events influences the participants’ views.”¹⁹

As one of the many planets that have long orbited in the Soros solar system, I have worked with many institutions over the decades that have benefited from his largesse. While I was a dean at the University of California, Berkeley, Soros funded several programs to bring young Chinese and Burmese journalists to the graduate school I oversaw. When I moved to the Asia Society in New York, his foundation began funding programs in media, climate change, and US-China relations. At the same time he generously supported Chinese writers and intellectuals who had run afoul of China’s one-party state. Despite the fact that Soros’s critics and detractors are many, I cannot say that in my long association with him I have ever seen any such grounds for criticism. Soros is not a demonstrative or sentimental man, but his commitment to trying to make the world a better place by building a constructive community of well-informed doers seems irrefutable.

Indeed, as I write these paragraphs I sit in Pasadena, California, with my dying wife. Even here Soros’s multifaceted generosity and interlocking networks have touched our lives. When his own Hungarian-born mother lay on her deathbed in his New York City home, as Soros attended her, he decided to set up a program in palliative care to teach hospitals and caregivers how to better help families confronting the tragedy of losing loved ones. As he explained in launching his Project on Death in America, “First and foremost, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals need better training in the care of the dying, especially in the relief of pain. Physical pain is what people fear most about dying. A dying person in pain cannot think about anything else, leaving no room for coming to terms with death, for reviewing one’s life, putting one’s affairs in order, for saying good-bye.”²⁰

When I called him and Tamiko to tell them that my wife would be joining a drug trial at the City of Hope cancer research center and hospital, they immediately connected me with Katherine Foley, a neurologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. Having headed the pioneering pain management service at the hospital’s cancer center, she became the medical director of the Supportive Care Program that Soros funded. There, a new generation of medical personnel have been trained to help hospitals, patients, and families manage end-of-life issues in a more informed and humane way. And in her intelligent, business-like manner, Foley introduced us to one of her Soros program–trained colleagues, Matthew Loscalzo, who had become the executive director of the Department of Supportive Care Medicine at the City of Hope where his wife, Dr. Joanne Mortimer, directed the Women’s Cancer Programs. Without their help and good counsel, the death of my wife would have been even more painful and trying than it was.

For me, here in the most concrete way was one more illustration of how George Soros’s seemingly endless network of interlocking networks was succeeding in helping people in need, in the most basic and human of ways. His efforts may not have always been successful in bringing about radical changes and in opening societies in countries like Russia and China, but he has, at least, helped many individuals in those countries while supporting the better instincts of others in myriad walks of life around the world.