Business 19 October 2017, 12:29pm

Four Hungarians on Forbes 400 who are wealthier than Sándor Csányi

Portfolio

Forbes magazine has recently published its latest list of the 400 wealthiest people on the plant, which features four Hungarian-born billionaires. One of them owns one of the most successful hedge funds in history. Another is considered as a pioneer in the electronic securities trading, and a third went to space twice. Oh, and their combined wealth amount to nearly half of Hungary’s total public debt.

Even the least wealthy Hungarian-born billionaire on Forbes 400 has 2.2 billion dollars, which make him richer than Sándor Csányi, Chairman-CEO of Hungary’s OTP Bank who was listed on top of the list of the country’s wealthiest people by business daily napi.hu, with assets worth HUF 260 billion (cc. USD 1 bn).

1st - George Soros, USD 23 billion

The 87-year-old legendary hedge fund manager ranks 20th on the Forbes 400 list, with real time net worth of USD 23 billion. He was born in Budapest as György Schwartz in 1930. Having survived Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, he fled the country and immigrated to England in 1947, and put himself through the London School of Economics working as a railway porter and waiter. Soros earned a Bachelor of Science in philosophy in 1951, and a Master of Science in philosophy in 1954, both from the London School of Economics. He moved to the United States in 1956, where he worked as a philosopher for a year, then later as an arbitrage trader for F.M. Mayer in New York. In 1969 Soros set up the Double Eagle hedge fund with USD 4 million of investors' capital including USD 250,000 of his own money. Soros and his assistant, Jim Rogers, left the firm Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder in 1973 to start Soros Fund Management, a private partnership with only one employee, a secretary. Double Eagle was renamed the Quantum Fund in 1979. Soros is well-known for his philanthropic activities. He has been active as a philanthropist since the 1970s, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa, and began funding dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain. The Soros Foundation was established in 1983 and “the bulk of his [Soros’s] enormous winnings is now devoted to encouraging transitional and emerging nations to become "open societies," open not only in the sense of freedom of commerce but—more important—tolerant of new ideas and different modes of thinking and behaviour," former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote in the foreword of Soros's book The Alchemy of Finance in 2003.

Source: AFP/ Eric Piermont

2nd - Thomas Peterffy, USD 15.11 billion

Thomas Peterffy (31st), born Tamás Péterffy in 1944, is a Hungarian-born American entrepreneur who is considered as a pioneer of digital trading. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1965 as a refugee, a penniless descendant of a dispossessed aristocrat family, as the Soviets confiscated virtually everything his family owned. Peterffy began his career in the US as an architectural draftsman working on highway projects for an engineering firm. He left his career designing financial modelling software and bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange to trade equity options. During his career in finance, he has consistently pushed to replace manual processes with more efficient automated ones. He would write code in his head during the trading day and then apply his ideas to computerized trading models after hours. Peterffy created a major stir among traders by introducing handheld computers onto the trading floor in the early 1980s. His business related to his AMEX seat eventually developed into Interactive Brokers in 1993, which markets its specialized trading platform to sophisticated investors. He also founded Timber Hill, an electronic market-maker in options, which was once the world’s largest options market. Peterffy is currently CEO of Interactive Brokers and is on the 31st spot of the Forbes 400 list with real net worth of USD 15.1 bn.

Source: AFP/ Eric Piermont

3rd - Steven Udvar-Hazy, USD 3.9 billion

Born in 1946 as Ferenc István Udvarházy, the philanthropic businessman is currently Chairman of Air Lease Corporation. His first airplane leasing firm, International Lease Finance Corp. (ILFC), was sold to AIG in 1990 for USD 1.3 billion. The UdvarHázy family left Hungary during the 1956 revolution and arrived in the U.S. in 1958, fleeing the Soviet occupation. He attended University High School in Los Angeles, and the University of California, Los Angeles, studying economics. He is well known for his philanthropic work. He gave a USD 66 million grant to the Smithsonian Institution that allowed the U.S. National Air and Space Museum to build the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center annex at Washington Dulles International Airport. The annex houses more than 120 aircraft and 140 space-exploration exhibits as of 2006, and also includes the Space Shuttle Discovery. With real net worth of nearly USD 4 billion he is on the 179th spot on the list.

Source: AFP/Leon Neal

4th Charles Simonyi, USD 2.2 billion

Born in 1948 in Budapest as Károly Simonyi, the software developer has made two trips to space, and during his years at Microsoft he participated in the making of programmes such as World and Excel. He moved to the USA in 1968 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.S.in Engineering Mathematics & Statistics in 1972 under Butler Lampson. He met Bill Gates at Microsoft in 1981 who suggested Simonyi start an applications group at Microsoft with the first application being a WYSIWYG word processor. He left Microsoft in 2002 to co-found, with business partner Gregor Kiczales, a company called Intentional Software. This company markets the intentional programming concepts Simonyi developed at Microsoft Research. It deals in developing platform for different applications. When Microsoft took over the company in April this year, Simonyi re-joined Microsoft, and with real net worth of USD 2.2 billion he made it to the Forbes 400 list on the 359th spot.