George Soros

George Soros is Chair of Soros Fund Management LLC and the Founder of the Open Society Institute. He was born in Budapest in 1930. He survived the Nazi occupation and fled communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Cape Town University in apartheid South Africa. He has established a network of philanthropic organizations active in more than 50 countries around the world. These organizations are dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and an open society. The foundation network spends about $450 million annually. Soros is the author of eleven books, including most recently The Soros Lectures at the Central European University. His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world.