George Soros turns 95 today, and for his birthday present America brought him the annihilation of his legacy.
Soros has been known for two things: making money and spending it on political influence. Over the last few years, he has handed over control of his empire to his son, Alex, and Alex seems unable to do either of those things successfully.
The money
First, Alex ruined his reputation for making money. George was once known as “the man who broke the bank of England,” famous for making $1 billion in one day by sniffing out arbitrage opportunities in currency exchange markets.
Taking control of Soros Fund Management, Alex became the man who broke the bank of Soros. In December 2021, Alex invested $2 billion to buy nearly 20 million shares of an electric vehicle company called Rivian at somewhere between $70 and $100 per share. It was one of the largest one-off investments the fund had ever made.
A year later, Rivan shares were selling for just $18 and Soros Fund Management sold at a loss of what must have been more than $1 billion. HedgeFollow, a website that tracks and ranks U.S. hedge fund performances, currently gives Soros Fund Management a performance rating of 1 out of 5 stars, making it one of the least successful in the country.
The politics
Alex is as talented at making billions vanish as George was at making them appear, but maybe he inherited some of his dad’s skill for political maneuvering and network building?
Well, no, not really.
Alex has become famous for posting photos of himself posing with Democratic politicians and liberal world leaders, but the actual influence of the George’s network seems to have been greatly diminished. Perhaps related to the massive losses on Rivian, in July 2023 Open Society Foundations announced that it would be laying off 40 percent of its staff worldwide, halting all new grants until February 2024, and completely changing its operating model. What had once been an international network of influence peddling was slashed to the bone.
The crowning achievement of the Open Society Network under Alex so far was the passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Open Society staffers, such as Tom Perriello, were so involved in pushing the legislation that Open Society Policy Center briefly re-opened lobbying operations and became one of the top lobbying spenders in the nation. Perriello was on the floor of the House when the bill was passed. (Capital Research Center has written at length on Soros’ involvement in the IRA. The research can be found here.)
Billions of dollars for EV chargers (that never got built) and billions more for EV tax credits were crammed into to the bill, seemingly the perfect bandage for Rivian’s revenue troubles. The IRA even allocated $3 billion for purchasing electric delivery trucks for the postal service, and Rivian is one of the biggest producers of electric delivery vans. But, despite the EV subsidies and green energy handouts, the bill came too little and too late to save Soros’ investment in Rivian.
This period coincided with another of Alex’s big political maneuvers: Spending at least $4 million on Stacey Abrams’s failed gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. During that time, Rivian was starting to build a “giga-factory” outside of Atlanta and, most importantly, asking the state government for subsidies. In the eleventh hour of the Biden administration, Rivian was also awarded $6.5 billion loan for the factory from the Department of Energy. Construction on the factory has yet to even start, and Rivian stock currently trades at less than $12 per share.
The decline and fall of the Soros DA’s
George’s most notable political achievement, one so famous that his name was used to coin the term for it, was the funding of the “Soros DAs.”
One of George’s goals for decades has been to end of the War on Drugs and implement a total overhaul of the American criminal justice system. To that end, he has funded soft-on-crime think tanks and pro-legalization ballot initiatives.
And then, in a showcase of the financial genius that made him a billionaire, George spotted a political arbitrage opportunity. He realized his immense fortune could make an outsized impact if he supported soft-on-crime politicians running to become local prosecutors and district attorneys.
A lot of them won. And then, “Soros DA” became a political lightning rod as soaring murder and violent crime rates followed behind George’s donations.
Coupled with the “reforms” and defunding of the police that were popularized during the summer of 2020, the Soros DA became a nationwide blight on urban areas. While left-leaning pundits, researchers, and think tanks, frequently funded by Soros, tried to explain away the spike in crime and blame it on the pandemic, guns, or economic hardship, Americans grew more discontented with the “reform” they had been promised.
Today, more than a dozen Soros DA’s have been removed from office by recalls, scandals, or simply not seeking re-election. And the spike in urban crime ended up being a key factor for the Democratic Party’s defeat in 2024.
The demise of the Soros DA is more than a rejection of Soros’ legacy on criminal justice policy. It was also a rejection of his legacy on immigration. As one might guess from a name like “Open Society,” Soros is a proponent of open borders. One reason Soros began funding DAs in 2016 was to create “sanctuary cities” that would be the heart of the so-called “resistance.”
The second election of Donald Trump—in a race where crime, immigration, and the IRA were three of the major issues—was America’s personal slap to George Soros’ face. Today, on his 95th birthday, his legacy is in shambles.
Happy Birthday, George!
