Background

Ethnicity: His father, Alfredo Guillermo Paulson, was born in Ecuador. His mother, Jacqueline Boklan, was a daughter of the Jewish.

John Paulson was born in 1955 in Queens, New York, in a pleasant and somewhat obscure middle-class neighborhood called Beechhurst. His father, Alfred, an accountant who came from a Norwegian family that had settled in Ecuador, rose to become C.F.O. of Ruder & Finn, a public relations agency. But John’s investment-­banking genes seemed to have come from his mother’s father, Arthur Boklan, who, during the crash of 1929, was a banker at a long-since-vanished Wall Street firm. In an interesting parallel with his grandson, he apparently prospered even as the Great Depression dragged the country into misery

Education

Paulson attended school at the Whitestone Hebrew Centre in Whitestone, New York. He attended a series of local public schools, where he entered a program for gifted students. By eighth grade, Paulson was studying calculus, Shakespeare, and other high-school level subjects.

He graduated summa cum laude in Finance from New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration in 1978. Then he received his Masters of Business Administration with high distinction, as a Baker Scholar, from Harvard Business School in 1980.

Career

After completing his studies John Paulson worked for one of the biggest management consultancy firms: Boston Consulting Group; where most of his work was research based. Later, he got enlisted with the Odyssey Partners. In 1984, he progressed towards the investment banking sector by joining Bear Stearn where he was appointed as the managing director of M&A. His speculations on the rise and falls of mortgage rates overwhelmed many within the league. Paulson worked as an independent aristocrat by achieving a partner status in a merger arbitrage firm known as Gruss Partners LP but eventually the partnership came to an end in 1989. Meanwhile, he celebrated several good investments in Samuel Adams brewery, nightclub, discotheque and real estate. He started his own hedge fund with $2 million in 1994 named of Paulson & Co. Many attractive investments were done after that. In 1996 a companion offshore fund Paulson International Ltd was formed, which was a leveraged version of its firm. Corresponding, he shaped four hedge firms with a motive to insure the default risk of mortgages. One of his firms The Credit Opportunities which was inaugurated in 2007 with assets of $130 million, rose to $3.2 billion within 12 months during the subrime crisis.

Achievements

• #41 Forbes 400 (2015), #35 in 2014; #113 Billionaires (2015), #45 in United States; #4 Hedge Fund Managers (2014).

Works

• Other Work

  • Author: Reference Book on Investment Banking, 1980.

Politics

John Paulson is a very active political contributor and activist. During 2000 to 2010, contributions worth $140,000 were made to the political parties, and candidates, 45% went to Republicans, 16% to Democrats, and 36% to special interests.

Views

Quotations: "No one strategy is correct all the time."

“Our goal is not to outperform all the time – that’s not possible. We want to outperform over time.”

“I had to swallow my pride, buckle down the hatches, and just be patient.”

"There is nothing more important to improve humanity than education."

Membership

John serves on the Board of Trustees of New York University; Board of Trustees of the Central Park Conservancy; the Deans Advisory Board of the Harvard Business School; the Board of Directors of the 92nd Street Y; the Board of the Partnership for New York City; and the Chairman’s Circle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Personality

John Paulson is a philanthropist. He has made several notable donations, which embraces $15 million to Center for Responsible Lending, $20 million to New York University Stern School of Business, $15 million to build a children’s hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador and £2.5 million to the London School of Economics for the John A Paulson Chair in European Political Economy. Furthermore, $1 million was donated to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC Restore Our Future. He was honored as the 22nd largest Super PAC donors in an episode of the Colbert Report.

Connections

John Paulson Spouse – Jenny (Zaharia) Paulson. Paulson married Jenny in 2000; she is of Romanian descent. She arrived in America after her brother George moved to Queens. Before marriage, she worked for Paulson as his assistant. John has 2 daughters - Giselle and Danielle.

Father:

Alfred Paulson

Mother:

Jacqueline Suzanne (Boklan) Paulson

Wife:

Jenny Paulson