Ray Dalio and the Allure of Billionaire B.S.
Ray Dalio and the Allure of Billionaire B.S.
Rob Copeland’s ‘The Fund’ is an indictment of the elite compulsion to conflate wealth with genius.
This morning The Lever published my latest article: “The King of Wall Street B.S.”
The piece reviews journalist Rob Copeland’s phenomenal new book, The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend, an investigation into the world’s biggest hedge fund and its billionaire founder.1
In the review I describe The Fund as “a page-turning portrait of a bully and bullshit artist—and, more fundamentally, a damning indictment of the elite compulsion to conflate wealth with genius.”
For the most part, it didn’t seem to matter whether Dalio’s insights were accurate, or even insightful—because he ran a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund. His wealth and his ability to generate profits gave him an almost impenetrable shield of elite credibility. Like many CEOs, because Dalio ran a profitable company, he was simply presumed to be an expert in whatever other fields he happened to take an interest in.
I hope you’ll read the full review in The Lever. Thanks to Lucy Dean Stockton, Joel Warner, Andrew Perez, David Sirota, and the rest of the team at The Lever for editing and publishing it.
This review isn’t the first time I’ve written about Ray Dalio. Earlier this year, in an article for The Atlantic, I argued that Dalio’s embrace of autocratic heads of state revealed him to be one of a growing number of executives and ideologues who are enthusiastic about unfettered and unregulated capitalism—while remaining lukewarm (at best) about messy, complicated things like “democracy.” (I added some additional thoughts about Dalio in a subsequent newsletter.)
But I first cited the CEO-turned-professional “thought leader” years earlier, in a very different context: the pages of my 2020 book, Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft of Life, One Day at a Time.2
I turned in the final manuscript of Reframe the Day around the end of 2019, but as the book’s 200-plus quotes and citations suggest, many of its ideas were inspired by the reading that I’d done over the previous decade. A lot happened in that time. So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point I’d find myself a little less enthusiastic about some of the material in the book.
One such source was a blog post written by the venture capitalist Paul Graham, a co-founder of the VC fund Y Combinator.3 In the early 2010s, in some of the less toxic corners of the self-improvement internet, Graham was well known for a blog post in which he offered a distinction between two types of daily schedules: those of “makers,” who derive value from creating things, and those of “managers,” who would rather coordinate them.4 This distinction intrigued me, and I discussed it in my book.
More recently, however, Graham has contributed his voice to a group of VCs and other Silicon Valley tycoons who seem weirdly fixated on attacking and undermining their critics—particularly journalists, such as the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, as well as the entire New York Times—who attempt to challenge their conviction of how the world works.5
Needless to say, this is not exactly the cohort I’d look to today for insights on building a fulfilling life, or really any other topic.
Nor would I look to billionaire hedge-fund founders. In Reframe the Day, right after citing Graham’s makers and managers, I quote Ray Dalio. I don’t remember where I first heard of Dalio or how I decided to listen to the audiobook of Principles: Life and Work, his 2017 bestseller, but a few of his thoughts about management and “the satisfaction of success” apparently stuck with me.
As it turns out, in citing Dalio I was just one of many who were seduced by the image of “professional thought leader and expert-on-all-things,” as I describe it in today’s review, that Dalio sold to the world. This image diverged more than a little from reality.
The Fund captures brilliantly the gulf between Dalio’s actions and his pronouncements, between the reality of Bridgewater and the narrative portrayed by the firm. It is a story enthusiastically bought by countless world leaders, reporters, investors, and influencers (and, for a time, even me).
Steadily, Copeland writes, “grew the chasm, wider by the day, between what Dalio told the world about life at Bridgewater and what was actually going on.” At a certain point, the story of Dalio and Bridgewater became so entrenched that it ceased to matter who the man actually was or what the firm actually did.
In response to the book, Dalio, the self-proclaimed proponent of “radical open-mindedness” and “idea meritocracy,” hired multiple law firms to attack Copeland and his publisher. “The evidence shows that Dalio is universally outraged by any writer whose reportage on Bridgewater is less than laudatory,” Copeland writes.
The same might be said of some tech elites, including the one I cite in Reframe the Day, who seem to believe that anyone who challenges their preferred narrative must be incapable of understanding their brilliance and benevolence, or have ulterior motives, or both.6
Who knows if I’ll write more about my journey of trying to craft a fulfilling life. But if I do, neither the actual billionaires, nor the aspiring ones, will be who I turn to for wisdom.
You can read the full review in The Lever: “The King of Wall Street B.S.”
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250276933/thefund
https://www.adaml.blog/reframe-the-day
Just to underscore how nothing is new and everything, or at least everyone, feels connected: Graham had previously appointed Sam Altman, the recently deposed and reinstated founder of OpenAI, to run Y Combinator. In 2019, in a process that seems to be becoming a pattern, Graham fired Altman over “concerns that [Altman] put his own interests ahead of the organization,” according to the Washington Post.
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21325678/venture-capitalists-vc-media-silicon-valley-clubhouse-tech-journalists; https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/a-journalist-does-not-deserved-to-be-harassed-by-vcs-taylor-lorenz-balaji-srinivasan
https://nypost.com/2023/09/07/ray-dalio-fails-to-silence-tell-all-that-pierces-veil-of-benevolent-business-titan