Anna Porter - Buying a Better World: George Soros and Billionaire Philanthropy

The Messiah of Wall Street

G eorge Soros, despite the wear and tear of more than eighty years, is a surprisingly fit and dapper presence. He has seemed in good shape on all occasions when I have seen him, including February 2014, after he had suffered a broken leg. The accident, he told me in somewhat self-deprecating tones, happened on the tennis court. He has a reputation for playing hard, competitive tennis. One of the young men recruited to fill in for a game in London said Soros was a formidable opponent, fast, powerful, and with a fine range of tricky shots at the net.

My first interview was in February 2012 in his vast, airy Seventh Avenue office. I crossed a shiny expanse of floor overlooked by huge windows and followed the stairs to where he had chosen to meet. The small boardrooms long table had nothing on it while the few volumes in the bookcase were his own. He was fashionably dressed in a sharply pressed grey suit that barely rippled as he approached. He wore an elegant blue and red tie, narrow and understated. His birdlike mien was reinforced by the very pronounced lines around his eyes, his large nose, and his thick, finely cut grey hair, swept upward like a tuft. He walked quickly, obviously in a hurry the welcoming smile was fleeting and preoccupied but he remained focused and polite throughout the time he spent with me, although I was aware of his frequent covert glances at Michael Vachon, his long-time political advisor and assistant. (The right-wing press calls Vachon his consigliere. ) I found it interesting that Soros would care what his handler thought. He was a man who had chosen his own path in developing his philosophical framework of ideas, in building his enormous wealth, and dispensing much of it through his foundations.

At first he seemed surprisingly modest for a man who has admitted in another context that he has harboured rather potent messianic fantasies since childhood and had an exaggerated view of my self-importance to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god.

In its 2013 ranking of billionaires, Forbes estimated his net worth at $20 billion, which may explain why gorgeous young women like Brazilian bombshell Adriana Ferreyr and, more recently, Tamiko Bolton chose to spend so much time with him. Bolton, forty-two, and Soros, eighty-three, celebrated their marriage at his Bedford estate in September 2013. The reception, one of the most lavish evenings ever seen even in this elite part of the world, followed the next day. There was a hot air balloon made of flowers, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, heads of the World Bank and some eastern European countries, and five hundred of Americas rich and famous. The dedication to Soross newest book reads: For Tamiko, without whom this book would not have been possible.

Meanwhile, Ferreyr, exhibiting the hallmarks of a spurned lover, sued for $50 million for emotional pain and her former lovers failure to buy her an apartment on East Eighty-Fifth Street. The case was dismissed, but the New York State appellate court did not immediately dismiss the assault charge the former actress brought against Soros.

One story told about Soros reveals that he had once been afraid of women. If so, he managed to conquer that fear fairly early. His marriage to Bolton is his third, and the last time I checked he was the father of five and had ten grandchildren.

Soros was born Gyorgy Schwartz in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. His middle-class Jewish family changed their name to Soros when the government began to pass increasingly restrictive and punitive anti-Semitic laws, leading up to joining Nazi Germany in its grand design to conquer Europe and, as part of that design, kill all Jews.

His father, Tivadar, was a bright, enterprising lawyer who had an odd enthusiasm for Esperanto ( soros means will soar in that language). He had volunteered to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army for its First World War debacle, was captured by the Russians, and marched off to Siberia to labour in the mines. He escaped with a group of other Hungarian prisoners, survived the intense cold and the journey over mountains, made it through the 1917 Russian Revolution, and ended up in Moscow, where he founded an Esperanto association. In years to come, he credited his ingenious escape with teaching him the skills that his family needed to survive the Holocaust. Similarly, his son George, only fourteen years old in 1944 when the round-up of Hungarian Jews began, acknowledged his fathers extraordinary ability to thrive in impossibly tough times.

Tivadar paid a government employee for false identity papers to help hide the family and instructed them on how to blend in with local gentiles. George became Sandor Kiss, a refugee from Romania. He accompanied his professed godfather on a tour of the Kornfeld estate the home of a wealthy Jewish industrialist that the Nazis confiscated in exchange for allowing the Kornfelds to escape. In 2010, this episode returned to haunt Soros when Fox News Glenn Beck accused him of having worked for the Nazis, stealing Jewish property while his fellow Jews were deported. Soros, usually at ease in responding to interview questions, was lost for words. The idea that he should feel guilty about surviving the Holocaust had never occurred to him, nor had he imagined that anyone could blame him for impersonating someone else in order to stay alive.