George Soros attends a London School of Economics alumni dinner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, December 2006.
He’s the universal symbol of progressive tyranny, the image of Davos despotism. He’s the immigrant who broke the Bank of England and hedge fund master who plundered Wall Street. He’s a globe-trotting globalist active in dozens of countries, yet loyal to none. He’s the embodiment of philanthropy’s decay from its biblical pedigree into cultural Marxism. He’s a narcissist out to remake the world in his own cynical image. To those familiar with his “open society” ideology, he’s a menace bent on killing the West.
For millions across the world, George Soros is simply the face of evil.
But much of the notorious mega-donor’s life and legacy is complicated and hazy. Even at 94, Soros wields enormous influence over the institutional Left — the armada of activist, lobbying, policy, and litigation groups that really run the modern Democratic Party — something he aims to pass on to his 39-year-old playboy son and heir, Alexander, who took control of his father’s hedge fund and foundations less than two years ago.
This writer began reporting on George Soros’s dark money spigot at its zenith in the early Trump years, when it seemed money could buy anything in Washington. Fast forward to 2025, and Soros’s open society vision is itself on the ropes — and that’s stunning.
For decades, Soros shaped the Left into the emerging totalitarian force Americans roundly rejected in November 2024. Billions of his dark money dollars launched Washington’s professional activist class from the fringe to the heart of the Democratic establishment. Now, however, even Democratic strategists are complaining that the party takes too many directives from the woketariat: the “college-educated elites” guilty of “placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win,” as one operative groused after Election Day.
“The only Democrat group that is not actually proud of their country to a large extent at this point is progressive activists,” says liberal pollster Ruy Teixeira, who once predicted the rise of a permanent Democratic majority. “If you are trying to sell to people the idea that…America is fundamentally a benighted, almost dystopian place that was born in slavery, marinaded in racism, and white supremacists of this very day, and, you know, runs around oppressing the world’s people[,] I don’t see why anyone would sign up with you.”
For anyone familiar with the Democratic machine’s inner workings, that’s tantamount to rebellion, and utterly unprecedented. For two decades, Beltway activists — and the multi-billion-dollar foundations behind them — have ruled America’s liberal party with an iron fist. Yet in his twilight years, George Soros may live to see that once unshakeable legacy collapse.
The Early Years
The project to fundamentally transform America may have peaked around 2020, but its most influential architect began his life in 1930 Budapest.
György Schwartz was powerfully shaped by the authoritarian climate of his native Hungary and its proximity to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In 1936, his father, Tivadar, changed the family’s German-Jewish surname to “Soros,” which means “designated successor” in Magyar or “to soar” in Esperanto, the invented international language he treasured.
By all accounts, Tivadar Soros was a remarkable and intelligent man as well as an early internationalist. In the First World War, he volunteered as an officer for the Austro-Hungarian Empire fighting on the Eastern Front, where he was captured by Russians and sent to a POW camp in Siberia. Tivadar organized a mass escape and subsequent odyssey across a nation devastated by the 1917 Russian Revolution before returning, barely alive, to his family in Budapest. Tivadar then set up shop as a small-time lawyer who dabbled in left-leaning politics, publishing an Esperanto journal.
Then came the Holocaust. As Hungary’s anti-communist regime aligned the country with the Axis powers, it passed new laws restricting the rights and movement of Hungarian Jews. In 1944, Germany installed a National Socialist government in Hungary which ultimately deported 500,000 Jews to the death camps.
During the war, Tivadar Soros courageously invented false identity papers for his and other Jewish families and helped them hide from the Nazis. Despite the hardship, however, George now calls 1944 “the happiest year of my life.” “This is a strange, almost offensive thing to say because 1944 was the year of the Holocaust, but it is true,” he explains in Soros on Soros, a candid 1995 interview made a decade before he rose to global political prominence. He continues:
I was 14 years old. I had a father whom I adored, who was in command of the situation, who knew what to do and who helped others. We were in mortal danger, but I was convinced that I was exempt. When you are 14 years old, you believe that you can’t really be hurt. For a 14-year-old, it was the most exciting adventure venture that one could possibly ask for. It had a formative effect on my life because I learned the art of survival from a grand master. That has had a certain relevance to my investment career.
It also has a certain relevance to his character. Part of young George’s “adventure” meant posing as a Christian to avoid detection, enabled by a family friend who told officials George was his adopted godson. It also involved helping Nazi enforcers confiscate property from Jews who had been deported to the camps, something Soros is amazingly candid about decades later in his 1998 interview with 60 Minutes.
“That sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?” asked host Steve Kroft.
“Not at all, not at all,” Soros replied, shaking his head and smiling. “Maybe as a child you don’t see the connection. But it created no problem at all.”
“No feeling of guilt?” Kroft asked.
“No.”
But Kroft presses him harder: “For example, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am watching these people go; I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?”
“Well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away,” Soros suggests contemplatively. “But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there because that was… well, actually, in a funny way it’s just like in markets, that if I weren’t there — and of course, I wasn’t doing it — but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. And it was, whether I was there or not — I was only a spectator — the property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
The segment is uncomfortable to watch because Kroft clearly wants Soros to confess regret about playing a role, no matter how minor or understandable, in aiding the Nazi confiscators. But he doesn’t.
After the war ended in 1945, 15-year-old Soros considered traveling to the Soviet Union because, he recalled, “I’d like to find out the nature of this new system that we have to live under. Instead, his father — recalling his own harrowing trip through the workers’ paradise — steered the boy toward the United Kingdom, and in 1947 George was able to slip past the Iron Curtain by attending an Esperanto conference in Switzerland. From there, he settled in London and enrolled at the London School of Economics under the ex-Marxist philosopher Karl Popper, whose ideas about the “open society” so colored Soros’s ideology that they later provided the name for his Open Society Foundations.
For a man who became one of the world’s great investors, Soros’s career had a humdrum start. In the early 1950s he became a traveling salesman in the U.K. before landing a clerkship at the financial services firm Singer & Friedlander. Success came slowly. In 1956, he moved to New York and entered international arbitrage, buying securities (especially oil stocks) in one country and selling them in another. Soros excelled, developing a new form of trading he called “internal arbitrage,” a way of dividing combined “stocks, warrants, and bonds” and “trading them separately before they could be officially detached from each other.”
His breakthrough came when Soros became the first analyst in the U.S. to study German banks, discovering “you could buy some of the stocks at a tremendous discount from their actual values, once the cross-holdings were figured in.” He immediately went to J.P. Morgan executives, who instructed the young trader to “start buying immediately, before I completed the memo, because they thought that those stocks could double or triple on the basis of my recommendation.”
“That was the peak of the boom in European stocks and also in my career as a foreign securities analyst,” Soros says.
Hedging His Bets
In 1969, Soros established his own hedge fund — initially called the “Soros Fund,” now Quantum Fund — with $4 million, growing to $12 million four years later and $100 million by 1980. By then, Soros was personally worth $25 million. The firm’s junior partner was future CNBC analyst Jim Rogers, whom Soros met on Wall Street. Rogers did all the analysis, but “I made all the decisions,” Soros boasts. “He never pulled the trigger. He was not allowed to pull the trigger.”
Asked to describe his investment style, Soros explained: “I do not play according to a given set of rules; I look for changes in the rules of the game.”
That financial success came with a deep personal cost. Soros and his first wife, married since 1960, divorced in 1983 amidst a crunch to expand his company. The characteristically dispassionate Soros later called the divorce, among other things, “loosen[ing] the constraints under which I had been operating up to that time.”
The result was, ironically, a period of absolutely fantastic performance. We practically doubled our money in each of the next two years. The [Quantum] Fund jumped from $100 million to almost $400 million.
That’s when he lost money for the first time. Running the “machine” by himself had become next-to-impossible: “I realized I could not keep it up much longer because I would need a lot more ideas to feed a $400 million fund than I had needed at the beginning of this wild ride. The pressure became really almost too much to bear.”
In the end, he informed his shareholders of the loss, cut the $400 million fund in half — and came out ahead. At the time of his 1995 Soros on Soros interview, the Quantum Fund touted a 35% average annual return. $1,000 invested in 1969 would be worth $2.15 million 26 years later.
“I refused to remain the slave of my business,” Soros explains. “I established that I am the master and not the slave. It was a big change in many ways, because I began to accept myself as someone who is successful; I overcame fear of the misfortune that might befall me if I admitted my success.”
The Black Wednesday Billionaire
The Quantum Fund was well known by the early 1990s, but breaking the Bank of England put George Soros on the map. Britain was caught in a recession in 1992, with a weak economy, high inflation, and rising unemployment. The British pound was considered overvalued, and — pegged as it was to the Deutsche Mark — the Bank of England struggled to maintain a fixed rate required by the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), which attempted to stabilize exchange rates before countries adopted the euro.
Soros gambled that the U.K. would be forced to devalue its currency or exit the ERM, and his partners agreed. “If you guys really think this is such a good idea, bet the whole fund. … Don’t do it for $1.5 billion or even $5 billion. Do it for $15 billion,” Soros reportedly said.
He borrowed $10 billion and immediately sold it, shorting the British pound and gambling that the currency would plummet in value and the British would withdraw from the ERM — which they did, netting Soros $1 billion in a single day. (One odd but notable beneficiary: Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was part of the Quantum Fund team that broke the Bank of England.)
They called September 16 “Black Wednesday,” costing the Bank of England £3.3 billion ($6.75 billion in 2024 U.S. dollars) and the Conservative government a landslide defeat in the 1996–97 elections, which ushered in Tony Blair’s Labour Party majority.
It also made Soros immediately infamous, something he welcomed. The infamy helped him to “establish a platform from which I could speak out on other issues,” he later recalled. “And it worked. Suddenly I had a voice that could be heard.”
The Failed Philosopher
If Soros’s ego isn’t obvious, his contemptuous streak is: “I am both selfish and self-centered, and I have no qualms about acknowledging it,” he wrote in 2019. “I am, of course, not the only one who is selfish and self-centered. … I am just more willing to admit it.”
I have a very big ego — far too big for my mortal self. I can find sufficient scope for it only by identifying with something more enduring. Clearly, I am not a saint, nor do I aspire to be one. I cannot think of anything more unnatural and unrewarding than to be selfless.
On the Right, Soros is often accused of being a communist or radical leftist. He’s certainly a critic of “the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life,” as he argued in a 1997 Atlantic essay titled “The Capitalist Threat.” More broadly, Soros considers himself a “failed philosopher,” but he’s better described as a high priest of the liberal international order who uses his wealth to advance global elites’ interests.
Soros imbibed his worldview from the writings of Karl Popper, an Austrian Marxist-turned-libertarian whom Soros chose as a tutor at the London School of Economics “because I was very much taken with his philosophy … of open society.” The concept deserves some explanation.
After the Second World War, thinkers on both the Left and Right vowed “never again” to Hitler and the death camps. But instead of identifying the Third Reich as an aberration of European history, they concluded its totalitarian impulses are seeded deep in the soil of Western civilization — so those cultures had to fundamentally transform or risk breeding a new monster.
In The Authoritarian Personality (1950), for example, sociologists saw in America’s white, conservative, predominantly Christian middle class an army of “potential fascists” who might just fall for an American Führer. Something had to be done, and fast.
Enter Popper, the intellectual architect of a new global order. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), he diagnosed the totalitarian threat from “closed” societies: Traditional, hierarchical, conservative, and organic. Their people support powerful loyalties to enduring sources of authority such as the family, nation, and God — the bedrock elements of the West. Popper’s goal was replacing that old order with a global order, destroying those dangerous classical virtues.
Popper’s idea of “openness” isn’t so much a competing blueprint for society as a never-ending critique of all our strongest beliefs. Soros says as much: “Our ideal of the open society is unattainable. To have a blueprint for it would be self-contradictory.” It presumes that strong loves like patriotism — or objective truth — impart fascistic impulses to blindly obey our leaders. “Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth,” Soros argues. “Therefore, we need a critical mode of thinking” to break down the core elements of closed societies:
An open society such as ours is based on the recognition that our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. As the philosopher Karl Popper has shown, the ultimate truth is not attainable even in science. All theories are subject to testing, and the process of replacing old theories with better ones never ends.
For two millennia, the Bible provided the West with the image of a healthy nation. By God’s design, our natural love of kin starts with our family, spreads to our neighbors, and ends with our nation. While the Bible commands all people to love their neighbors, we obviously cannot love everyone globally as we do our closest neighbors: “The result is that the highest point of political sovereignty ends with the nation-state,” writes scholar Ben R. Crenshaw. Nations are the natural enemy of one-world governments.
As such, “openness” is a universal solvent that progressively breaks down existing loyalties. Its end goal is blending all sovereign nations into a single, global “we.”
In the Cold War, that meant countering Communism and deregulating the economy, which the post-war Right leapt at. Soros’s first project, in fact, was funding Hungarian dissidents in the Soviet Union, later expanding operations across all of eastern Europe as the evil empire collapsed.
But it later came to mean the Sexual Revolution, gay liberation, Antifa (“anti-fascists”), multiculturalism, open borders, identity politics, DEI, transgenderism—and most critically, dissolving the family into a mere basket of individuals, atomizing the most fundamental unit of Western culture.
Consequently, the open society tries to degrade natural collectives like nations by pretending they don’t exist. Only the individual is sacred — or even real. The “family” is just a name we give that collection of rational economic units who happen to be related. This was true of 20th century leftists and libertarians alike: “To the free man,” Milton Friedman wrote in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, “the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”
The system may require tolerance of transgender ideology and other absurdities, but it can’t tolerate any dissent. By the logic of the post-war consensus, we’re either headed toward an ever-more-open society or Nazism, so “racist” dissidents must be canceled. Since this globalist system is the only thing preventing Hitler’s return, its defenders are stuck living in 1939. It’s Davos or Hitler — and it always will be.
In 2019, George Soros authored his latest — and likely last — book, In Defense of Open Society, an attack on Brexit and the 2016 election using remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Open societies are in crisis,” he warns. “In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish a mafia state, but he can’t because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it.”
By “civil society,” he means himself: “My foundations, most of our grantees, and myself personally are fighting an uphill battle protecting the democratic achievements of the past” against “repressive” opponents of an open society who literally threaten “the survival of our civilization.”
Fortunately, says Soros in a prediction that’s aged like milk, Trump’s populism will prove “a purely temporary phenomenon” that will forever vanish after his (coming) defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Weaponizing Philanthropy
Soros the “failed philosopher’s” writings are dry, abstract, and aloof. He comes across as detached, even jaded, in bantering about mental constructs, economic theories of perfect and imperfect knowledge, like a benign god surveying mortals. He repeatedly mentions his own “fallibility,” but the modesty is hollow — and he clearly wants you to know it. “Having made more money than I need, I have been liberated from the law of gravity: I can afford to stand up for abstract principles,” he observes.
I have spoken about my godlike and messianic impulses from time to time. The closer I have come to actually fulfilling them, the more I’ve become aware of my own humanity. But with all these great ambitions, I am sometimes still amazed at my actual accomplishments. This is particularly true in my philanthropy. As I travel around and see the results, I find them quite awesome and very gratifying.
“I certainly don’t feel messianic about investing,” Soros once said. “I indulge my messianic fantasies in giving away money that I’ve already earned.”
Initially, he was leery of trying to change the world through philanthropy, calling it “basically a corrupting influence” because ” it corrupts not only the recipient, but also the giver, because people flatter him and never tell him the truth.” Consequently, when founding the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Soros decided they should “keep a low profile, working quietly in the background.” That worked for a time as OSF concentrated on seeding democracy and “openness” in post-Soviet Europe. But by 2000, Soros says, “it was time to do something at home.”
One of OSF’s earliest U.S. campaigns was ending the Reagan-era War on Drugs by backing California’s “Compassionate Use Act” in 1996, legalizing medical marijuana for the first time in America. At the time, Soros heaped scorn on critics who accused him of wanting to legalize drugs. Yet in 2019 his position had apparently evolved: “My priority going forward is to build support in the United States for decriminalizing drug possession as Portugal and some other European countries have done,” he declared.
California’s adoption of medical marijuana proved decisive in shifting national Democrats — who took a tough-on-drugs stance under President Bill Clinton and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder — toward national legalization under Obama. As a U.S. senator, Obama himself clearly wanted to decriminalize marijuana; he said so plainly in 2004 at a private event. Then he ran for president, and his campaign hurriedly walked back those comments in February 2008, when polls showed him losing to Hillary Clinton, who warned the public that marijuana is a “gateway drug.”
Just two months after taking office as attorney general in March 2009, Eric Holder announced a moratorium on federal raids on medical marijuana distributors. He now supports full decriminalization of weed. By 2016, Obama was busy pardoning or commuting the sentences of federal inmates convicted of narcotics charges and recasting marijuana “as a public-health issue” akin to “cigarettes or alcohol.”
Fast forward to 2020, and every Democrat running for president endorsed some form of drug legalization — including fentanyl possession, even as opioid overdose deaths exploded from 70,000 in 2020 to 151,000 a year later. By 2024, marijuana decriminalization featured in the Democratic Party platform and Kamala Harris’s desperate bribe to bring black men back into the fold.
