IN THEIR philanthropy, the Arnolds like to say, they follow data where it leads rather than let themselves be guided by ideology. This 37-Year Old Billionaire Ended up Among the Worst Hedge Fund Comedian John Oliver spent 20 prime-time minutes on HBO last May mocking the reign of terrible science on TV news shows and in public debate. 5. [23] Other multi-million gifts followed to other education programs, for example to Washington, D.C. city schools for merit pay, to Teach for America, and to StudentsFirst. Like Tom Steyer, George Soros, and a number of other mega-donors on the Left, John Arnold earned his vast wealth as a hedge fund investor. But as a practical matter, we grew to be so large in terms of our appetite for change in our policy areas that it just became cumbersome to have a C3 group on one side and a C4 group on the other side and having them not really be able to talk to each other. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, launched a similar LLC (the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) in 2015, with Zuckerberg transferring some 99 percent of his shares in the social media company to the LLCan amount reportedly exceeding $45 billion. Laura and John established the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in 2010 with a straightforward mission: to improve lives through evidence-based solutions. For now it's John Arnold. His ~$3 billion fund, Centaurus, was down 4% in 2010 YTD, according. Laura Arnold has served on the boards of the Innocence Project[29] and the REFORM alliance. Whole Given our enormous appetite for policy change, and given the fact that we thankfully are not constrained by one structure, we dont have resources channeled only to the C3. John Arnold - Centaurus Advisors - Insider Monkey 4 Houston tycoons join prestigious Texas Business Hall of Fame John Arnold shocked the hedge fund world in 2012 when, at just 38 years old, he announced he would no longer manage other people's money. [30] The former foundation was sued over a pre-trial web tool by the family of a victim who was murdered, but the District Court and a U.S. Appellate Court dismissed the complaint. One of the counterparties Amaranth approached was Centaurus. Had something similar happened on Wall Street, he tweeted, the perpetrator would have been sentenced to 10 years in jail and the bank would have been fined a billion dollars. I think I was just born with a natural gift for seeing numbers in a special way, he says. In finance, meanwhile, at least when one is trading with ones own money, there are strong incentives to work to that stronger standard. Bruce Kovner, Caxton Associates . As Nosek tells it, John Arnold had read about the Reproducibility Project in The Chronicle of Higher Education and wanted to talk. Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold committed Monday, April 5, 2021, to donate 5% of their wealth annually as part of an effort to . It was the largest cash bonus ever distributed by the company. Its a stupid little badge, Nosek says, but it works. For one thing, the problems plaguing scientific research are now increasingly well known. Flagship In 2013 they donated $10 million to keep Head Start, the early-childhood education program for low-income kids, running through the federal government shutdown, and many of the issues theyve taken on, from criminal justice reform to making prescription drugs more affordable, are decidedly progressive. Top 12 Most Big-Hearted Billionaires - TheStreet Gerrymandering endangers democracy. Brian Nosek had pretty much given up on finding a funder. [16], During the collapse of Amaranth Advisors, Centaurus is widely credited as being one of the major players on the other side of their position, returning as much as 150% in 2005. He has also served as the Investment Manager for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation since 2011. NatGas Conference Call Schedule, This article is part of NGI's Daily Gas Price Index. In my conversations with Arnold and his grantees, the word incentives seems to come up more than any other. They internalize the risk of mistaking correlation for causationnot because theyre smarter than scientists but because they have money riding on the outcome. John Arnold got his start as a natural gas trader at Enron. Legendary Energy Trader John Arnold to Retire - CNBC Having spent more than a decade picking apart nutrition science, Taubes soon found himself cofounding an organization with a substantial grant from the Arnold Foundation, to rebuild the study of obesity from the ground up. NGI Archives Texas billionaire quietly steered millions toward groups linked to Centaurus Advisors Awards & Accolades. [3] [8] His father was a lawyer and died when Arnold was 18. Get access to 100,000+ more news articles & industry data. John Laura and John Arnold didnt start the movement to reform science, but they have done more than anyone else to amplify its capabilitiestypically by approaching researchers out of the blue and asking whether they might be able to do more with more money. Put a Stake in "Zombie Charity.". Projects that Nosek had once envisioned as modest efforts carried out in his lab were now being conducted on an entirely different scale at the centers startup-like offices in downtown Charlottesville, with some 70 employees and interns churning out code and poring over research. John Arnold has criticized labor unions, college tuition schedules, and the New York Timess increasing contempt for free speech. The aim was to redo about 50 studies from three prominent psychology journals, to establish an estimate of how often modern psychology turns up false positive results. When we started as solely a foundation and we had a C4 that was kind of ancillary to it, we respected the distinction and division the law requires.