Jim Simons, legendary hedge fund manager who cracked the market, dead at 86

Jim Simons at a gala in March 2019.

Sylvain Gaboury/Getty Images

Billionaire hedge fund manager Jim Simons has died.The legendary investor was 86.Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, and was an NSA codebreaker, prolific mathematician, and philanthropist.

Jim Simons, the legendary billionaire hedge fund manager who founded the wildly successful Renaissance Technologies, died on Friday, according to the foundation he started.

He was 86 years old.

Simons was a titan of investing and the 49th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $31.8 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

Before he took Wall Street by storm, Simons made a career as an award-winning MIT mathematician and NSA codebreaker during the Cold War. His work in pattern recognition and topography would later help form the bedrock of string theory in quantum mechanics.

Simons founded what would become Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund specializing in quantitative models, in 1982.

Over three decades, Renaissance has become one of the most successful hedge funds in history, boasting staggering 66% annualized returns (before fees) over a 30-year period.

Among his fund’s biggest current holdings are investments in vaccine-maker Novo Nordisk, Uber, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, and Tesla.

In Gregory Zuckerman’s book “The Man Who Solved the Market,” Simons said he got into investing after getting tired of academia.

His strategy was unlike anything on Wall Street at the time. Simons used the same pattern-recognition talent that propelled his academic career to scour financial data for trends.

Simons’ algorithmic approach has paid off with huge profits. He had put his massive wealth to use as a prolific philanthropist, founding the Simons Foundation to promote science and mathematics and donating billions of dollars to his causes.

Simons also founded Math for America, a nonprofit supporting math teachers in secondary schools, and has donated millions to leading universities, including his alma maters, MIT and University of California, Berkeley.

“Jim was an exceptional leader who did transformative work in mathematics and developed a world-leading investment company,” Simons Foundation president David Spergel said in a statement.

Simons is survived by his wife, three children, five grandchildren, and a great-grandchild, his foundation said.