And regarding the Soros clan, I've thought about it and I still wonder why Alex got the old man's nod to run the money.
Alex
Soros lives in the duplex penthouse of a building in downtown
Manhattan. The elevator opens onto the apartment, where a framed
photograph of Alex and his fiancée, Huma Abedin, sits on a small table
by the entrance. Apart from its artwork I am asked not to identify for
security reasons, his home is sleek and uncluttered and has south-facing
floor-to-ceiling windows and an exposed spiral staircase leading to the
upper level. An atriumlike living room is appointed with white leather
sofas Abedin dislikes, and is in the process of replacing, and a glass
coffee table, on which rests a recent compendium on sculpture co-edited
by Alex’s mother, Susan Weber, a historian of the decorative arts.
He
invites me to meet him there for the first time in early February, not
long after his return from the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, where the architects of globalization watched from Alpine
remove as their consensus positions on free trade, migration, and
international relations were, one by one, abandoned in Donald Trump’s
new Washington. For years, Alex’s father, George Soros, the founder of
the family’s Open Society Foundations, was a headliner at Davos. In the
Soros household, Alex dryly notes, late January held special
significance: “I would go back to school, and my father would go to
Davos.”
Alex,
39, is dressed in black leather boots, black pants, and a black
turtleneck, a uniform that matches his pallid complexion, intense
demeanor, and Ph.D. in European intellectual history. I have been
cautioned that he is socially uneasy and impatient with chitchat. “I
don’t know how to explain this,” says his close friend Svante Myrick,
the former mayor of Ithaca, “but he will walk away from a boring person
mid-sentence.” After mumbling pleasantries and offering to make me an
espresso, Alex sits down at a dining-room table, ready to answer
questions. Working on a laptop at the table is 62-year-old Michael
Vachon, an intimidating, arch-loyal adviser whom Alex offhandedly and
with only a trace of irony calls his father’s consigliere.
The
setting itself is a testament to a certain indifference to public
opinion on Alex’s part — or perhaps a lack of awareness. This past fall,
he held a fundraiser at the apartment for vice-presidential candidate
Tim Walz, then created a PR headache by posting photos from the event on
social media, as is his custom after meeting heads of state and elected
officials. (As a former OSF higher-up says, Alex likes to collect
“shiny objects.”) It was deemed unhelpful to a presidential ticket
straining to underscore its regularness that the son of the 94-year-old
hedge-fund billionaire accused of puppeteering the Democratic Party was
publicly advertising his centrality to the election effort from a New
York City penthouse.
In
a way, Alex was being transparent: Between the roughly $100 million he
spent to elect Democrats and the several hundred million more his
endowed foundations spent on sympathetic causes, George was probably the
biggest liberal donor of the most recent election cycle. (It is hard to
know for sure because of untrackable dark-money spending.) Alex told The Wall Street Journal it
was better for the family to operate in full view rather than be
subject to antisemitic tropes about shadowy Jewish financiers. “There’s a
view that we are some sort of hidden conspiracy,” he said.
The
right ascribes a near-unlimited influence to George — from
orchestrating the Women’s March and other mass protests in the U.S. to
funding migrant caravans from Latin America to undermining Christian
values in Europe — and coverage of his activities can imply that he is
personally tipping the scales in various causes and races. The reality
is that, while the money is his, George is no longer active. It is his
chosen successor, Alex, the second youngest of his five children from
two marriages, who now makes the bets as president of George’s super-PAC
and chairman of his $20 billion philanthropic empire. This functionally
makes Alex the key megadonor poised to bankroll the liberal movement
for years to come.
Alex’s
appointment in late 2022 jarred loyalists and veteran hands in his
father’s orbit. A decade ago, he gained a “Page Six”–stoked reputation
for decadent Hamptons parties and stereotypical heir behavior. He
follows dozens of models on Instagram; fellow billionaire benefactor
Michael Bloomberg follows unicef and Canadian prime minister Mark
Carney. But in private he is brooding and cerebral and has a propensity
for candor and bursts of hot-temperedness. His halting, Peter Thiel–like
baritone is full of ahs and ums, and his sentences
can sound like records skipping, as if he were unable to easily put into
language what is clear in his mind.
This
slightly tortured persona has invited comparisons with his elder
half-brother Jonathan, who sprang from Harvard Law School and a federal
clerkship to work alongside his father in finance and philanthropy.
Jonathan is described as an even-keeled presence and looked the part of a
successor, down to his cheerful, full-faced resemblance to a younger
George. After Alex was announced as chair, the organization’s first
president, Aryeh Neier, spoke for many when he said, “I expected
Jonathan to be the one.” Someone with deep OSF ties says, “The real
story is that every single person who knows the family knows that Alex
was exactly the wrong person to lead the foundation.”
When
Soros insiders try to explain the family dynamic, they draw on the
standard texts of empire and heredity. “Roman is Alex,” says a former
OSF senior official, referring to Roman Roy, the sardonic failson in Succession.
“Smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the
details.” Another Soros insider cites not HBO but the Gospel of Luke,
casting Alex in the role of the Prodigal Son, who is rewarded with his
father’s love despite his wayward years.
If
Alex feels underqualified to be a liberal power broker, he doesn’t show
it. When I ask for his autopsy of the presidential election, he
breezily argues Joe Biden was “assassinated” by “the pundit class” after
his disastrous debate, erasing a proven Trump-beater from the ballot
while giving his successor too little runway to achieve liftoff. “The
fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump had gone on that debate stage
and, you know, shit his pants and had a heart attack, Republicans would
still be there saying, ‘Yeah, he’s our guy,’” he says. “That meltdown
that we had publicly is a discipline problem.”
As
invested as he is in the success of the Democratic mainstream, Alex is
simultaneously supportive of the party’s progressive wing, via
OSF-funded NGOs that advocate left-leaning stances on immigration,
criminal justice, and other issues. As one donor adviser puts it,
Sorosworld is the “metronome” that sets the tempo of the progressive
movement. When I ask him to respond to the critique that many of these
groups — or the Groups, in Beltwayspeak — were responsible for pulling
the party too far left and costing it the election, he is dismissive.
“First of all, it’s not smart after an election to go after your base,”
he says. “Second of all, you know, the quick takes, the hot takes —
let’s see which age well.”
Alex
might be too entangled in the institutions of liberalism, ranging from
the centrist Establishment to the activist pressure groups, to perceive
its failures. And that’s not even to mention his impending June wedding
to Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide-de-camp and the ex-wife of
former congressman Anthony Weiner — a gift to anyone looking for proof
that the globalists are at last closing in on a one-world government,
with the Weiner side plot as a prurient throw-in.
But
Alex has a penchant for arguing both sides, like someone who enjoys
playing chess with himself. Despite his reluctance to criticize the
activists his foundation funds, he can seem out of sync with them,
rolling his eyes at the advertising of one’s pronouns and the left-wing
censoriousness of the past era. (“Should we, you know, have rebelled
against … Dave Chappelle?”) And though he might sometimes seem a
Davosboy to his father’s Davosman, he finds the corporate-friendly scene
at the World Economic Forum pretty lame, using his princely status
there to look bored at panels and mock its shibboleths. In an onstage
interview a couple of years ago, he announced to the gathered
neo-liberals, “Neoliberalism is dead.” Absent a new socioeconomic model,
he forecast, “the alternative will be owned by MAGA extremists, by
populists, by nationalists.”
As
we spoke throughout the spring, Alex could be maddeningly discursive
about the Trump administration’s escalating assault on civil society,
which may well come next for his own organization. He said America was
in a “nihilistic moment,” and he worried about the “lasting damage” the
president was inflicting — even as he dismissed Trump as a
self-destructive chaos agent. “I talk to real strongmen around the
world, and they laugh at him.”
Exactly
how to push back against the madness he leaves unclear. Nor does he
offer any coherent agenda for the Democrats, whose roiling, inconclusive
debates can seem personified by Alex himself. He was a regular presence
at the Biden White House, one-half of an odd power couple, yet few in
the broader political universe have a grasp of how he thinks about the
world and plans to spend the wealth at his disposal. That money could
help determine the fate not only of a rudderless Democratic Party but of
a country that every day is disappearing legal residents and
immigrants, shaking down universities, defying court orders, and
otherwise taking aim at the very open society his father’s global
philanthropy exists to uphold. After the intrusions of the Kochs and the
Adelsons, America is in its most nakedly oligarchic era since the
Gilded Age, one in which the most visible billionaire ultradonor, Elon
Musk, has taken charge of swaths of the federal government. Alex Soros,
an aspiring kingmaker who also spends the better part of his day in his
own head, is, for better or worse, standing on the other side.
An
hour or so into our first meeting, Alex’s chief of staff, Laura Silber,
shows up to accompany him to his next engagement, a tour of the new
Anne Frank exhibition at the Center for Jewish History, where he is on
the board. Silber also oversees communications for OSF, and like Vachon,
she has known Alex since he was a kid. She manages many of the
practicalities of Alex’s life and accompanies him more or less
everywhere he goes. Although he is almost 40 years old, Alex has a
distracted, adolescent quality. I suspect he is not fully aware of his
own calendar and must often be dragged by Silber to things that are on
it.
Silber
invites me to join them at the exhibition, and the three of us head
down after she hails an Uber. Alex groans: “Do we have to give them
money?” He means Uber. We hop in the SUV, and he begins a vexed
monologue about the start-up types he’d bump into when he was a grad
student at the University of California, Berkeley. “The people who
worked at Facebook, the people who created Uber, they really believed
their own bullshit. They really believed they were helping the world,”
he says. “It was a bunch of nice Jewish boys who kind of gamed the
system and, Oh, lets not become doctors, lawyers; I’m helping the world by putting taxis out of business.”....
