Peter L. W. Osnos

THE NAME GEORGE SOROS IS WORLD FAMOUS. And yet the man himself is surprisingly little understood.

Depending on who or where you are, describing Soros is likely to elicit different answers. He has even more identities than he has lived decades, now into his tenth.

In addition to survivor, billionaire, speculator, philanthropist, activist, author, nemesis of the far right, and global citizen, there is husband, father, and, to an extent he may not even realize, friend.

The first eight of these are Soros’s public profile, and they are the focus of this book. Over the years, attempts have been made to write George Soros’s biography, but no single account of his life can capture its extraordinary, multifaceted character. The writers whose work appears in this volume have approached Soros from the perspective of those whose expertise in their fields have enabled them to provide a description of his activities and—to the extent possible—the motivation for them and their impact. There will be places where the narratives overlap; think of these as interlocking pieces of a puzzle covering a vast area. Some essays may not altogether reach the same conclusions. On a canvas this wide, this is perhaps inevitable. And with so much to cover, there may well be less of some activities than of others. But the breadth of these portrayals is considerable.

Essential to this process was that the writers have complete confidence in their independence of judgment, along with the responsibility to be accurate and fair-minded—while also recognizing that anyone writing about another person will bring his or her own experience to the task.

The essays are not intended to describe in detail how Soros’s activities and initiatives have developed over the decades. Suffice to say that the paths have not always been smooth. In finance there are straightforward measures of outcome—money spent, money earned, profit and loss.

In philanthropic areas, success or failure is more difficult to assess because there are few clear metrics. Have the efforts and expenditures provided the desired results? When situations and personalities require changes to be made, how are these handled? The answers to these questions—especially at the Open Society Foundations and Central European University, among the most ambitious philanthropic commitments of modern times—are yet to come.

These institutions have been founded by Soros, funded by Soros, and are ongoing. All the essays in the book are portrayals of George Soros’s experiences and vision and how he uses his wealth. He does seek counsel, advice, and information from other people. But the ultimate decisions have been and will continue to be his, as long as he can make them. This is not always popular.

So, this volume has been compiled with the assurance that it would be the best possible representation of George Soros’s life we can achieve. And he and his family did not read it until it was completed. I have guided the project with the assistance of Paul Golob, the estimable editor who has worked with me to bring the essays to final form. The opinions expressed, as the saying goes, are those of the authors. It will not be surprising if Soros’s critics find some fault with the essays.

My own dealings and fascination with Soros began in the 1980s, as he became involved with human rights issues, particularly Human Rights Watch. As a former journalist in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia (including the war in Vietnam), and by personal instinct, I was also an advocate and interpreter of human rights issues.

In 1997, I founded the publishing house PublicAffairs, whose very first list included Soros’s book The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. All his books that have followed were likewise published by PublicAffairs, as well as in dozens of countries around the world.

My latest publishing venture, Platform Books LLC, is copublishing this book with Harvard Business Review Press to assure the broadest possible reach for the book in the world marketplace.

In a book of my own, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, I reflected on George Soros and our engagement over the years. I made the case that Soros was one of three individuals who were instrumental in the ultimate demise of the Soviet empire. The others were the great Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov and Pope John Paul II. Sakharov, because of the universal acclaim for his humanism and democratic beliefs; John Paul, because he became the symbol throughout Eastern Europe of defiance of Kremlin orthodoxy; and Soros, because the combination of principles and wealth enabled him to back the avatars of Western open society where they did not exist.

As the Soviet empire entered its final stages before dissolving in 1991, Soros was in many ways the capitalist fantasy of all latter-day communists—a very, very rich man. What the Soviets and Eastern Europeans did not recognize about Soros was that his genius for making money was matched by his passion for the “open society” as defined by the philosopher Karl Popper. In the years of glasnost and perestroika and the early years of the post-Soviet era, Soros created an infrastructure of civil society organizations and support for democratic ideals and education.

What the communists and their successors missed was that Soros was subversive to their ideology, a radical as well as a billionaire.

Increasingly after 2000, as the politics of these countries deteriorated after early hopefulness, pressure on the open society enterprises grew. The record of the post-Soviet era is still unfolding. Nonetheless, an entire generation of people saw what was possible in progressive reform.

In the years since, Soros has continued to refine his guiding philosophical and financial thesis called “reflexivity”—the way events and trends influence how markets sway, often with unintended consequences. Knowing how to make the right early calls was a source of Soros’s genius and enormous wealth.

In particular, the great international recession of 2008–9 was widely seen as a validation of his sense of how market distortions such as subprime mortgages can convulse economies. Soros was very proud of his open society philanthropy and activism. But I think he took exceptional pleasure in finally being recognized for his philosophy.

Over the years, Soros became a major nemesis to the global extreme right wing, which has deployed a mix of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes to discredit his activities on behalf of progressive causes and civil society. The bizarre notion that he is a mastermind of everything the right-wingers around the world reject is nonsense. The attacks are not easy to ignore, especially when a bomb was placed in the mailbox at his home in Bedford, New York.

Yet Soros has displayed extraordinary equanimity (at least as I could measure) in almost every way. Michael Vachon, his savvy longtime adviser on media and politics, said one evening as we sat at dinner, “George, no one is ever going to feel sorry for you” having to endure the slings and arrows of fame and fortune.

What did bother Soros, I thought, was that in his homeland of Hungary, the autocratic leader Viktor Orbán, who had once studied at Oxford as a Soros-funded fellow, made Soros the focus of his nativist political strategy. In time, I came to understand the significance of Soros’s personal heritage: that the influence of his father, Tivadar, in the war years was a basis for his own daring and risk-taking in finance and in life generally.

All this and a great deal more is discussed in these essays. Each of the writers is a highly respected expert in the aspect of Soros’s life and work they are exploring.

The opening essay is by Eva Hoffman, whose early years in Poland, in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, give her a particular understanding of Soros’s experiences during that time and the impact on his life. Her own admired books prepared her for this account of his background and early years.

Sebastian Mallaby is a writer who can, with extraordinary clarity, explain the development of Soros’s career as a speculator (Soros’s own term), his instincts about how to amass wealth, and how he has shaped the modern world of finance.

Darren Walker, as the president of the Ford Foundation, is a preeminent twenty-first-century philanthropic leader. He is also a Black man and proudly gay. Walker explains Soros’s approach to philanthropy, how it fits into today’s world, and why it has been so meaningful to him and others who have been underserved and victims of racism and bigotry.

Gara LaMarche led the launch of the Open Society Foundations’ work in the United States. As president of the Democracy Alliance, LaMarche has joined in Soros’s involvement with US politics and was fully aware of the relentless attacks of the far right, startling in their crudeness and falsehoods. LaMarche combines a career in civil liberties and human rights with an acute awareness of political strengths and failings.

Ivan Krastev is of the generation that emerged after the fall of the Soviet empire, which enables him to write with a measure of distance about how Soros took on the challenge of bringing open society principles to places it had not been and the frustrations that were perhaps, in retrospect, inevitable.

Michael Ignatieff is an acclaimed author who deploys his philosophical ideas to practical application in institutional leadership. As the former rector of Central European University, an institution founded by Soros, he has seen the great asset it can be as well as the difficulty in fulfilling its vision.

Orville Schell, one of the world’s foremost experts on China, helped guide Soros in his interactions with the ascendant superpower. With his equally brilliant wife, the late Baifang Schell, he became an adviser to Soros and, in the process, a confidant.

Leon Botstein is a scholar, a college president for nearly fifty years, and a well-known orchestra conductor with a deep appreciation of the identities that have defined George Soros: as a Jew, as a survivor, and as an innovator in many fields of consequence. Botstein is an exceptionally astute interpreter of Soros’s persona and his place in history.

This book is not a philanthropic exercise. It has been funded by a private entity that is backed by Soros’s wealth (though not by his Open Society Foundations). That money will be repaid from revenues the book accrues. In other words, this book is a business venture of an unusual kind, and given the subject, this should not be altogether surprising.

As I wrote at the outset, no book can be sufficiently broad to describe every aspect of Soros’s life. There are parts that only he can truly examine—his approach to family, for instance—and insights that are only his to share. What you have in this book is, as nearly as anyone can do it, George Soros’s life in full.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK several people for their role in making this book a reality: George Soros and his wife, Tamiko Bolton, for their cooperation with this book from the outset; Michael Vachon for his assistance at every stage; Christine Marra for her role as production editor; Bill Warhop for his copyediting; Adi Ignatius at Harvard Business Review Press and his colleagues for being wise and encouraging copublishers; and Paul Golob for his always superb editing. And of course I would like to thank Susan Sherer Osnos, my wife and partner in Platform Books.