Background
Berkowitz, was raised in a Jewish family in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of Hennie and Barney Berkowitz.
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Bruce Berkowitz
Edit ProfileEducation
He attended Chelsea High School and Huntington Preparatory before graduating from Beaver Country Day School. In 1980, he graduated with a bachelor"s degree in economics, cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Career
Berkowitz founded Fairholme Capital Management in 1997 and was formerly a senior portfolio manager at Lehman Brothers Holdings and a managing director of Smith Barney. After college, Berkowitz worked at the Strategic Planning Institute in Cambridge, a management consulting firm. In 1983, he joined Merrill Lynch in London.
In 1986 he accepted a job with Lehman Brothers in London and then transferred to their New Jersey office in 1989 as a senior portfolio manager.
In 1993, he became a managing director of Smith Barney Investment Advisers. In 1997, Berkowitz started his own firm, Fairholme Capital Management.
The name of the firm "Fairholme" was the name of the last street on which he had lived. In late 2010 it was announced that Berkowitz had joined the board of directors of the Saint Joe Company.
Berkowitz donated $6.75 million to the Center for Jewish History which is dedicated to the preservation of Jewish history and genealogy.
His donation along with that of Bill Ackman, the Chief Executive Officer of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, the president of Leucadia National, were the three largest individual gifts that the center has ever received.
