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Steve A. Cohen, owner of Point72 Asset Management, is a prominent Wall Street figure.
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Cohen has an estimated net worth of $14.8 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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His fund, SAC Capital, pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2013, though Cohen was not personally charged.
Billionaire Steve Cohen is known on Wall Street for being one of its most successful traders.
The 68-year-old runs the $39 billion hedge fund Point72 Asset Management and was famously dubbed the “hedge fund king” in 2006 due to his grand slam returns.
Cohen started his first hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, in 1992 with $25 million and grew into a financial behemoth.
Cohen, however, eventually found himself in a legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over insider trading and fraud charges against his firm in 2012. As part of a $1.8 billion settlement in 2013, the firm pleaded guilty to insider trading and Cohen agreed to an SEC ban on managing outside investments for a period of time.
In 2014, he converted SAC into a family office and launched its successor, Point72 Asset Management. The firm began managing outside money when Cohen’s SEC ban lifted in 2018.
But Cohen’s name isn’t just known within the world of finance.
After years of owning a small stake in the New York Mets, he bought the team for $2.4 billion in 2020. Since then, his reputation as an intense businessman has shifted to that of a passionate owner in the Major Baseball League.
Here’s a look at the career rise of the legendary hedgefunder.
He’s a New York native who grew up in a middle-class family.
Cohen was one of eight children born to a piano teacher and a garment manufacturer. In high school, the billionaire worked at a supermarket, Bloomberg reported.
He graduated from Wharton with a degree in economics.
He studied economics at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Outside of class, he traded stocks and beat his friends at poker. He was in a fraternity, too. He joined the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.
Cohen loved stocks so much that he would trade them in between his classes, according to a 2003 Bloomberg Businessweek profile. In his spare time, he would also beat all of his friends at poker.
He started his career on Wall Street at Gruntal & Co.
After graduating in 1978, he went to Wall Street to work for at boutique investment banking and brokerage firm Gruntal & Co. as a junior trader in the options arbitrage group.
His beginnings on Wall Street inspired a legend that he made $8,000 his first day and was bringing in around $100,000 each day. He became a star at Gruntal and by 1984, he started running his own group of traders.