The Billiken's Bluff

I couldn't see that happening to Donald Trump (how would you even misspell Trump?). However, after reading this article it appears Bruce Kovner (proper spelling) is having the last laugh. The Donald is powerful in the sense that he has pop culture cachet - You're Fired!. Bruce Kovner, on the other hand, may not be recognized on the street, may not appear on the Howard Stern Show, but is most certainly powerful. For instance Kovner:

-manages the largest hedge fund in the world
-is paying for the renovation of Lincoln Center
-is chairman of Julliard
-once commissioned a 2 million dollar artistic rendering of the Bible.
-financed the right-wing daily newspaper New York Sun
-is chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, which has supplied the Bush administration with such household names as Dick Cheney and John Bolton
-built a room in his 5th Ave Mansion that is made of "lead-lined plywood" and called a CBR Room - Chemical Biological Radiation: a safe room against a dirty bomb (maybe he is privied to some insider information from Cheney).

All of the interests me. The fact that he has this influence in so many spheres of public life and yet has escaped scrutiny also interests me. But what really interests me is the narrative of his ascent.

Members of Kovner's family were accused of being Communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. Bruce, in turn, ends up running the world's largest hedge fund, the most acute form of capitalism.

Kovner was working towards a doctorate in Government at Harvard when he dropped out.

Here is the best part of the story. At 28 years old he was driving a cab. That was Bruce Kovner's job as he approached the age of 30. A New York cabbie. And this right around the time of Scorcese's Taxi. Being a cabbie in NYC in the 70s was not for the faint of heart. Some real Bull Market Shit. Maybe this propelled him to succeed as a commodities trader. Cutting people off. Making that red light. Blowing through a STOP sign. I'll stop with the analogies, however, I wish this story in New York Magazine focused more on that pivotal moment where he stopped being a cab driver and started trading commodities. The turning point. It's such a great story. A cab driver in 1973, albeit a Harvard educated cab driver, who 10 years later finds himself sitting on a billion dollars. And he decides to not just be satisfied with being rich, but to use his wealth to influence spheres of public life which interest him - politics, music, theater. If I were writing a novel about a billionaire this would be the story I would write.

He is an excerpt from the article in New York Magazine:

Kovner described himself as a “writer” when he got married, at 28 in 1973, to an artist, Sarah Peter, in a Jewish ceremony in Connecticut. They moved to 57th between Eighth and Ninth, and he found a writer’s job: He drove a cab. “He told me that his wife was not exactly thrilled by that turn of events,” says Kovner’s friend Lionel Tiger, the anthropologist and author. This is the one point to which Sarah Peter responded, in a postcard she sent to me declining to be interviewed: “For the record . . . it’s incorrect that I was annoyed with him driving a cab.”

Her husband was suffering “vocational adolescence,” he would confess to his Harvard class. “I wondered if I was going to fulfill every Jewish mother’s fear that her son will turn into nothing but a bum,” he wrote (a curious turn of phrase, for the report was in 1991, 26 years after his mother’s suicide). By then, he had struck on a new course. “Somebody,” he would say, had introduced him to the commodities markets, and with the same thoroughness that he had studied government texts, he was staying up nights studying commodities—“devising paradigms and models, simulations, and scenarios.” He borrowed $3,000 against a MasterCard, and tried out his ideas in copper and interest-rate futures.