George Soros

Background

George Soros has firsthand experience with intolerance. He was born on August 12, 1930, in Hungary, during the Nazi occupation from 1944 to 1945, during which time, over 500,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered. His own Jewish family managed to live by obtaining fraudulent identification papers, disguising their identities, and assisting others in doing the same. Soros left Budapest in 1947 for London, working part-time as a train porter and a nightclub waiter to support his studies at the London School of Economics as the Communists secured power in Hungary after the war. He went to the United States in 1956, intending to make his fortune in the world of banking and investments.

He established his hedge fund, Soros Fund Management, in 1973 and went on to become one of the most successful investors in American history. Soros used his riches to form the Open Society Foundations, a worldwide network of foundations, partners, and projects. In 1979, Soros began his philanthropy by providing scholarships to black South Africans living in Apartheid-era South Africa. In the 1980s, he supported budding independent cultural groups and other efforts in Communist Hungary by funding academic travels to the West and funding academic trips to the West. He founded the Central European University after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a venue to develop critical thinking, which was an alien concept at the time at most universities in the former Communist bloc. With the end of the Cold War, he progressively expanded his philanthropy to include the United States, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, sponsoring a wide range of new initiatives aimed at making society more accountable, transparent, and democratic. He was one of the first prominent voices to denounce the drug war as “arguably more destructive than the drug problem itself,” and he was instrumental in the birth of the medicinal marijuana movement in the United States. He became an outspoken supporter of same-sex marriage movements in the early 2000s. His causes changed throughout time, but they remained true to his ideas of an open society.

Soros continues to take an active personal interest in the Open Society Foundations’ work, traveling extensively to promote it and advocating for beneficial policy changes with world leaders both publicly and privately. The Open Society Foundations stated in 2017 that Soros had donated $18 billion of his fortune to the Foundations’ future efforts, bringing his total generosity to the Foundations to over $32 billion since 1984. Soros has had three marriages and two divorces. He married Annaliese Witschak, an ethnic German immigrant who was orphaned during the war, in 1960. Although she was not Jewish, Soros’ parents loved her since she had also suffered the hardships and exile brought on by World War II. They divorced in 1983 after having three children. George Soros married Susan Weber in 1983. They divorced in 2005 after having two children. Soros met Tamiko Bolton in 2008, and the two married on September 21, 2013.