Robert Mercer

Robert Leroy Mercer (born July 11, 1946)[2] is an American hedge fund manager, former principal investor in the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica,[3] computer scientist who was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer, and former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.[2][4][5]

For other people named Robert or Bob Mercer, see Robert Mercer (disambiguation).
Robert Mercer
Born
Robert Leroy Mercer

(1946-07-11) July 11, 1946
San Jose, California, U.S.
EducationUniversity of New Mexico, Albuquerque (BS)
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (MS, PhD)
Spouse(s)Diana Dean[1]
Children3, including Rebekah and Jennifer

Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.[6] He is also a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News[7] and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president.[8] He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.[9]

In November 2017, Mercer announced he would step down from Renaissance Technologies and sell his stake in Breitbart News to his daughters.[10]

Early life and education

Mercer grew up in New Mexico. He developed an early interest in computers and in 1964 attended a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia where he learned to program a donated IBM computer.[11] He went on to get a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the University of New Mexico.[2] While working on his degree he had a job at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base writing programs where, though he felt he produced good work, he felt it was not optimized. He later said the experience left him with a "jaundiced view" of government-funded research.[11] He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972.[2]

Career

Mercer joined IBM Research in the fall of 1972 and worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York where he helped develop Brown clustering, a statistical machine translation technique as part of a speech recognition and translation research program led by Frederick Jelinek and Lalit Bahl.[12][13] In June 2014, Mercer received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award for this work.[14]

In 1993, Mercer joined hedge fund Renaissance Technologies after being recruited by executive Nick Patterson.[13][15] The founder of Renaissance, James Harris Simons, a quantitative analyst, preferred to hire mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists rather than business school students or financial analysts.[12][16][17] Mercer and a former colleague from IBM, Peter Brown, became co-CEOs of Renaissance when Simons retired in 2009.[13] Renaissance's main fund, Medallion, earned 39% per year on average from 1989 to 2006.[7] A bipartisan Senate panel estimated in 2014 that Medallion investors underpaid their taxes by some $6.8 billion over more than a decade by masking short-term gains as long-term returns.[18][19] As of 2014, Renaissance managed $25 billion in assets.[2] In November 2017 Mercer announced that he would be stepping down from his position at Renaissance Technologies. The decision was taken after the hedge fund faced backlash over Mercer's political activism.[20]

Mercer appears as a director of eight Bermuda companies in the Paradise Papers, some of which appear to have been used to legally avoid US taxes.[21]

Political activities and views

In 2015, The Washington Post called Mercer one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics.[22] Since 2006, Mercer has donated about $34.9 million to Republican political campaigns in the US.[23]

Mercer has given $750,000 to the Club for Growth, $2 million to American Crossroads,[24] and $2.5 million to Freedom Partners Action Fund.[25] In 2010, he financially supported fringe biochemist[26] Art Robinson's unsuccessful efforts to unseat Peter DeFazio in Oregon's 4th congressional district.[27] In the 2013-2014 election cycle, Mercer donated the fourth largest amount of money among individual donors and the second most among Republican donors.[2]

Mercer joined the Koch brothers’ conservative political donor network after the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC, but Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, decided to establish their own political foundation.[28] The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah, has donated to a variety of conservative causes.[2]

Mercer has donated to the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Media Research Center, Reclaim New York, GAI, and Citizens for Self-Governance.[11][29][30] In 2013, Mercer was shown data by former Jimmy Carter pollster Patrick Caddell, who has been critical of top Democrats, and commissioned more research from Caddell that showed "voters were becoming alienated from both political parties and mainstream candidates".[11]

Mercer was the main financial backer of the Jackson Hole Summit, a conference that took place in Wyoming in August 2015 to advocate for the gold standard.[7] He has also supported Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, Fred Kelly Grant (an Idaho activist who encourages legal challenges to environmental laws), a campaign for the death penalty in Nebraska, and funded ads in New York critical of the so-called "ground-zero mosque".[7] According to associates interviewed by Bloomberg, Mercer is concerned with the monetary and banking systems of the United States, which he believes are in danger from government meddling.[7] Mercer is a major source of funds of Breitbart News.[31] He gave at least $10 million to the media outlet, according to Newsweek.[32]

In 2015 Mercer also gave $400,000 to Black Americans for a Better Future, a conservative think tank led by Raynard Jackson.[33] Since 2017 Mercer has donated $87,100 to the same Super PAC.[34]

Brexit

Mercer was an activist in the campaign for the United Kingdom to end its membership of the European Union, also known as Brexit. Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, said that Mercer donated the services of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage, the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The firm was able to advise Leave.EU through its ability to harvest data from people's Facebook profiles in order to target them with individualized persuasive messages to vote for Brexit. It's been reported that Cambridge Analytica also has undisclosed links to Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ, which also played a pivotal role in Dominic Cummings' VoteLeave campaign, where he delivered an estimated one billion individually curated targeted adverts to voters in the lead up to the Brexit referendum, in contravention of established voting rules. Both VoteLeave and Leave.EU did not inform the UK electoral commission of the donation despite the fact that a law demands that all donations valued over £7,500 must be reported. In 2018, the Electoral Commission found the VoteLeave campaign guilty of breaking electoral law.[35]

2016 U.S. election

By January 2016 Mercer was the biggest single donor in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.[7] In June 2016, he was ranked the #1 donor to federal candidates in the 2016 election cycle as he had donated $2 million to John R. Bolton's super PAC and $668,000 to the Republican National Committee.[23] Mercer was a major financial supporter of the 2016 presidential campaign of Ted Cruz,[36] contributing $11 million to a super PAC associated with the candidate.[37] Mercer was a major supporter of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president.[8] Mercer and his daughter Rebekah helped to get Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway senior roles in the Trump campaign.[29] Rebekah worked with Conway on the Cruz Super-PAC Keep the Promise in the 2016 Republican primaries.[11] Mercer also financed a Super PAC, Make America Number One, which supported Trump's campaign.[29] Nick Patterson, a former colleague of Mercer's said in 2017 that Trump would not have been elected without Mercer's support.[15]

Race relations

Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists.[15]

Mercer was portrayed by actor Aden Gillett in the 2019 HBO and Channel 4 produced drama entitled Brexit: The Uncivil War.[38][39]

Personal life

Mercer and his wife Diana Lynne Dean have three daughters:[28] Jennifer ("Jenji"), Rebekah ("Bekah"), and Heather Sue. Rebekah runs the Mercer Family Foundation. The three Mercer daughters formerly owned a bakery called Ruby et Violette.[40]

Mercer plays competitive poker and owns an HO scale model railroad.[7] In 2009, Mercer filed suit against RailDreams Custom Model Railroad Design, alleging that RailDreams overcharged him by $2 million.[41]

Mercer lives at "Owl's Nest" mansion in Head of the Harbor, New York.[42] He has commissioned a series of yachts, all named Sea Owl.[43] The most recent one is 203 feet (62 metres) in length, and has a pirate-themed playroom for Mercer's grandchildren and a chandelier of Venetian glass.

In Florida, Mercer built a large stable and horse riding center. He has acquired one of the country's largest collections of machine guns and historical firearms, including a weapon Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in The Terminator.[7]

In 2013, Mercer was sued by several members of his household staff, who accused him of docking their wages and failing to pay overtime compensation.[42] The lawsuit was settled, according to a lawyer who represented the staff members.[36]

Mercer's net worth is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, and he is often referred to as a billionaire.[44][45]

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See also

References
  1. "Brides-To-Be". Albuquerque Journal. Albuquerque, New Mexico. May 25, 1967. p. 13.
  2. Delevigne, Lawrence (8 November 2014). "Have Mercer! The money man who helped the GOP win". CNBC. Retrieved 1 December 2014.
  3. Wylie, Christopher (2019-10-04). "How I Helped Hack Democracy". Intelligencer. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  4. Cadwalladr, Carole (17 May 2017). "The great British Brexit robbery: How our democracy was hijacked". The Guardian.
  5. Boag, Keith. Mayer, Andre (ed.). "Reclusive U.S. billionaire Robert Mercer helped Trump win the presidency — but what does he really want?". CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 2018-01-22.
  6. Cadwalladr, Carole (May 7, 2017). "The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked". The Guardian. The article has a disclaimer stating: "This article is the subject of legal complaints on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited."
  7. Mider, Zachary (20 January 2016). "What Kind of Man Spends Millions to Elect Ted Cruz?". Bloomberg L.P. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  8. Swan, Jonathan (17 August 2016). "Billionaire father and daughter linked to Trump shake-up". The Hill. Retrieved 18 August 2016.
  9. "Keep the Promise I/Make America Number 1 Contributors, 2016 cycle". OpenSecrets. 2016-11-18. Retrieved 2016-11-18.
  10. "Billionaire Investor Robert Mercer To Step Down From Firm, Selling Stake In Breitbart". NPR. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  11. Zuckerman, Gregory, Keach Hagey, Scott Patterson and Rebecca Ballhaus, "Meet the Mercers: A Quiet Tycoon and His Daughter Become Power Brokers in Trump’s Washington" (subscription), The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2017. Retrieved 2017-01-08.
  12. Bob Mercer; Peter Brown (18 October 2013). "Twenty Years of Bitext" (transcript). cs.jhu.edu. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  13. Patterson, Scott. "Pioneering Fund Stages Second Act". Retrieved 1 December 2014.
  14. "Robert L. Mercer receives the 2014 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award". aclweb.org. ACL. Retrieved March 27, 2018.video
  15. Mayer, Jane (19 March 2017). "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency". The New Yorker.
  16. "The 40 Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers". Forbes. Retrieved 12 September 2015.
  17. Mallaby, Sebastian (2011). More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. Penguin Press. ISBN 978-0143119418.
  18. "Renaissance Explores Settlement as IRS Seeks Billions in Taxes". Bloomberg.
  19. Bondarenko, Veronika (2017-04-05). "The Trump administration may have to decide whether to press one of his biggest backers on a contested $6.8 billion tax bill". Business Insider Australia. Retrieved 2019-07-30.
  20. Goldstein, Matthew; Kelly, Kate; Confessore, Nicholas (2017-11-02). "Robert Mercer, Bannon Patron, Is Leaving Helm of $50 Billion Hedge Fund". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-11-03.
  21. Swaine, Jon (7 November 2017). "Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon's attacks on Hillary Clinton". The Guardian.
  22. Phillips, Amber (21 September 2015). "The 10 most influential billionaires in politics". The Washington Post. Retrieved 22 September 2015.
  23. Bowers, John (7 June 2016). "A hedge fund house divided: Renaissance Technologies". OpenSecrets Blog. Center for Responsive Politics. Retrieved 9 June 2016.
  24. Yang, Jia Lynn (October 11, 2013). "Here's who pays the bills for Ted Cruz's crusade". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 11, 2013.
  25. Vogel, Kenneth (October 14, 2014). "Koch donors uncloaked". Politico. Archived from the original on 15 October 2015. Retrieved 12 September 2015.
  26. "The Grandfather Of Alt-Science". FiveThirtyEight.
  27. Mapes, Jeff (October 16, 2010). "Wealthy financier is mysterious funder of ads attacking DeFazio". The Oregonian. Retrieved October 11, 2013.
  28. Vogel, Kenneth; Schrekinger, Ben (7 September 2016). "The most powerful woman in GOP politics". Politico. Retrieved 7 September 2016.
  29. Confessore, Nicholas (18 August 2016). "How One Family's Deep Pockets Helped Reshape Donald Trump's Campaign". The New York Times. Retrieved 18 August 2016.
  30. Stanley-Becker, Isaac; Romm, Tony (April 22, 2020). "The anti-quarantine protests seem spontaneous. But behind the scenes, a powerful network is helping". The Washington Post.
  31. "How Business Titans, Pop Stars and Royals Hide Their Wealth". The New York Times. 7 Nov 2017. Retrieved 7 November 2017.
  32. Kutner, Max (November 21, 2016). "Meet Robert Mercer, the mysterious billionaire benefactor of Breitbart". Newsweek. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  33. Schwarz, Jon (28 January 2016). ""Black Americans for a Better Future" Super PAC 100% Funded by Rich White Guys". The Intercept. Retrieved 2 June 2018.
  34. "Federal Election Commission Mercer's Donations to Black Americans For A Better Future".
  35. "Hedge-fund billionaire and Donald Trump backer 'played key role in Brexit campaign'". The Independent. 2017-02-26. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  36. Lichtblau, Eric; Stevenson, Alexandra (April 10, 2015). "Hedge-Fund Magnate Robert Mercer Emerges as a Generous Backer of Cruz". The New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  37. Lichtblau, Eric (July 31, 2015). "'Super PACs' Spent Millions Before Candidates Announced, Filings Show". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 September 2015.
  38. Bennett, Asa (28 December 2018). "Brexit: The Uncivil War review: Benedict Cumberbatch is superb in this thrilling romp through the referendum". The Daily Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 8 January 2019.
  39. Matthew Elliott (4 January 2019). "Vote Leave's Matthew Elliott on Channel 4's Brexit: The Uncivil War". Financial Times. Screenwriter James Graham has turned the campaign into a compelling story — and nailed my mannerisms
  40. Dickerman, Sara (May 28, 2017). "Trump Megadonor Rebekah Mercer Makes Terrible Cookies". Politico.
  41. Marzulli, John (March 31, 2009). "Hedge fund hotshot Robert Mercer files lawsuit over $2M model train, accusing builder of overcharge". Daily News. New York. Retrieved October 11, 2013.
  42. Smythe, Christie (July 17, 2013). "Renaissance Co-CEO Mercer Sued by Home Staff for Over Pay". Bloomberg. Retrieved October 11, 2013.
  43. Matea Gold (March 17, 2017). "The Mercers and Stephen Bannon: How a populist power base was funded and built. The wealthy GOP donors and Trump's chief strategist collaborated on at least five ventures". The Washington Post. Retrieved March 19, 2017.
  44. Roux, Pamela (April 25, 2017). "Is Trump Backer Robert Mercer a Billionaire? I Tried to Find Out". Bloomberg Quint. Retrieved September 14, 2018.
  45. "Robert Mercer leaves hedge fund, sells stake in Breitbart". Fox News. November 2, 2017. Retrieved September 14, 2018.
Awards
Preceded by
Jerry Hobbs		 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
2014		 Succeeded by
Li Sheng
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