The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

by Gregory Zuckerman

For a while, Rebekah and her father backed traditional right-wing groups and causes, such as the Freedom Partners Action Fund, a conservative political action committee founded by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch and the Heritage Foundation. Sometimes, Rebekah and Bob would walk through Republican fund-raising events locked arm-in-arm. Rebekah, the more sociable of the pair, did most of the talking, while her father stood silently beside her. The Mercers quickly lost patience with the established organizations, however, and drifted to more controversial causes, giving $1 million to a group running attack ads against a proposed mosque in the vicinity of the World Trade Center’s Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.11 Then, in 2011, the Mercers met conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart at a conference. Almost immediately, they were intrigued with his far-right news organization, Breitbart News Network, expressing interest in funding its operations. Breitbart introduced the Mercers to his friend, Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker, who drew up a term sheet under which the Mercer family purchased nearly 50 percent of Breitbart News for $10 million. In March 2012, Breitbart collapsed on a Los Angeles sidewalk and died of heart failure at the age of forty-three. Bannon and the Mercers convened an emergency meeting in New York to determine the network’s future, and decided that Bannon would become the site’s executive chairman. Over time, the site became pop...

Stunning connection here between quant world and Cambridge Analytica. I had no idea.