Steve Cohen
Source of wealth: Hedge funds
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Modules
Biography
Steve Cohen oversees Point72 Asset Management, a $40 billion (assets under management) hedge fund firm that started managing outside capital in 2018.
For years Cohen ran SAC Capital, one of the most successful hedge funds ever.
Cohen was forced to shut down SAC Capital after the firm pleaded guilty to insider trading charges that cost Cohen $1.8 billion in penalties.
Cohen bought the New York Mets in 2020 for $2.4 billion, the highest sale price ever for an MLB team.
Cohen has given $1 billion to philanthropic causes over his lifetime, including causes related to veterans and children's health.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Steve Cohen
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Steve Cohen, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Hedge funds', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 158 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 10.3 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.