George Soros: Deportation Slips in Budapest to Breaking the Bank of England

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

George Soros was born Georgi Schwartz in Budapest in 1930. His father, Tivadar, a lawyer and former World War I prisoner of war active in the Esperanto movement, changed the family name to Soros in 1936. In 1944, after the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Council had 14-year-old George deliver slips that his father recognized as deportation notices, and Tivadar told him to warn each recipient. The family survived on forged Christian papers, with George posing as the godson of an official who once took him along to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. In 1947 he emigrated to England, worked as a railway porter and waiter, and studied under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics.

His grades were not high enough for an academic post, so he entered merchant banking and developed his theory of reflexivity. He moved to New York in 1956 aiming to save $500,000, launched the Double Eagle Fund with $4 million in 1969, and later renamed it the Quantum Fund, which had generated $40 billion in profits by 2013. On Black Wednesday in 1992 he built a $10 billion short against the pound, the U.K. left the ERM and he made an estimated $1 billion. Through the Open Society Foundations he has given over $32 billion, and from the early 2000s his U.S. political spending made him a target of conspiracy theories, Hungarian government campaigns and a 2023 swatting incident.

• Soros reads as "next in line" in Hungarian and "will soar" in Esperanto.
• He lectured crowds at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in Esperanto while living on Quaker charity.
• Malaysia's prime minister accused him of crashing the regional currency in 1997, then retracted the charge after meeting him.
• He was convicted in France over Société Générale trades and lost his final appeal at the European Court of Human Rights.
• He funded Solidarity and Charter 77 and smuggled copy machines behind the Iron Curtain.