Stanley Druckenmiller

Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller (born June 14, 1953) is an American billionaire investor, philanthropist and former hedge fund manager. He is the former chairman and president of Duquesne Capital, which he founded in 1981. He closed the fund in August 2010. At the time of closing, Duquesne Capital had over $12 billion in assets. From 1988 to 2000, he managed money for George Soros as the lead portfolio manager for Quantum Fund. He is reported to have made $260 million in 2008. Early life and education Druckenmiller was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Anne and Stanley Thomas Druckenmiller, a chemical engineer. He grew up in a middle-class household in the suburbs of Philadelphia. His parents divorced when he was in elementary school and he went to live with his father in Gibbstown, New Jersey (a section of Greenwich Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey) and then in Richmond, Virginia (his sisters, Helen and Salley, would stay with their mother in Philadelphia). Druckenmiller is a graduate of Collegiate School, Richmond, Virginia. In 1975, he received a BA in English and economics from Bowdoin College (where he opened a hot dog stand with Lawrence B. Lindsey, who later became economic policy adviser to President George W. Bush). He dropped out of a Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Michigan in the middle of the second semester to accept a position as an oil analyst for Pittsburgh National Bank. Investment career Druckenmiller began his financial career in 1977 as a management trainee at Pittsburgh National Bank. He became head of the bank's equity research group after one year. In 1981, he founded his own firm, Duquesne Capital Management. In 1985, he became a consultant to Dreyfus, splitting his time between Pittsburgh and New York, where he lived two days each week. He moved to Pittsburgh full-time in 1986, when he was named head of the Dreyfus Fund. As part of his agreement with Dreyfus, he also maintained management of Duquesne. In 1988, he was hired by George Soros to replace Victor Niederhoffer at Quantum Fund. He and Soros famously "broke the Bank of England" when they shorted British pound sterling in 1992, reputedly making more than $1 billion in profits, in an event known as Black Wednesday. They calculated that the Bank of England did not have enough foreign currency reserves with which to buy enough sterling to prop up the currency and that raising interest rates would be politically unsustainable.