Soros's Circle
The philosophers, investors, and policymakers who shaped Soros's thinking — or whose thinking Soros shaped.
Karl Popper
Intellectual mentor — Soros studied under Popper at LSE
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. His concepts of falsifiability, the Open Society, and the critique of historicism became the foundational pillars of Soros' entire intellectual system — from his theory of reflexivity to his philanthropic mission.
Profile →Co-founder, Quantum FundJim Rogers
Early business partner — co-founded Quantum Fund in 1973
Jim Rogers is an American investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973. During their partnership, the fund achieved extraordinary returns — reportedly over 4,000% in ten years. Rogers retired from the partnership in 1980 and went on to become known as a global macro investor and commodity specialist.
Profile →Portfolio Manager, Quantum Fund (1989–2000)Stanley Druckenmiller
Most important investing partner — executed the 1992 pound trade
Stanley Druckenmiller managed the Quantum Fund as lead portfolio manager from 1989 to 2000. He is widely credited with executing the mechanics of the 1992 British pound trade that made Soros famous. Druckenmiller has said the idea for the pound position was his, though Soros encouraged scaling it up to $10 billion. After leaving Quantum, he ran Duquesne Capital with exceptional results until 2010.
Profile →Development EconomistJeffrey Sachs
Intellectual collaborator on post-Soviet transition economics
Jeffrey Sachs is an American economist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He and Soros collaborated extensively on economic reform strategies for post-communist countries in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, with Soros funding economic reform programs through his Open Society Foundations that aligned with Sachs' shock therapy prescriptions.
Profile →President of RussiaVladimir Putin
Soros's principal antagonist — the closed-society ruler he opposed from 2000 to 2023
Vladimir Putin (born 1952) has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999. In Soros's writing he is the defining antagonist of the open society in the twenty-first century — from the 2000 prognosis in "Who Lost Russia?" through the Yukos expropriation, the hybrid war on Ukraine, and the weaponization of Syrian refugees, to the 2022 full-scale invasion that Soros framed as a civilizational fight between open and closed societies.
Profile →Chancellor of Germany (2005–2021)Angela Merkel
Central counterparty of Soros's euro-crisis advocacy — critic of her austerity, supporter of her refugee policy
Angela Dorothea Merkel (born 1954) was Chancellor of Germany for sixteen years and the de facto leader of Europe through the euro crisis. Soros criticized her 'do the minimum' incrementalism and austerity prescriptions for deepening the eurozone's north-south divide, while admiring her leadership on the 2015 refugee crisis — a duality that runs through a decade of his commentary.
Profile →Prime Minister of HungaryViktor Orbán
Former Soros foundation beneficiary (Oxford, 1989) turned chief antagonist — expelled CEU from Budapest
Viktor Orbán (born 1963) is Hungary's prime minister and the self-declared champion of 'illiberal democracy'. Once a beneficiary of Soros foundation scholarships, he became Soros's most personal antagonist: his government drove the Central European University out of Budapest, ran nationwide anti-Soros campaigns, and — in Soros's telling — built a kleptocratic system that the EU has tolerated for too long.
Profile →44th President of the United StatesBarack Obama
Backed in 2008, later 'disillusioned' — Soros's crisis-management case study
Barack Obama (born 1961) was the 44th President of the United States (2009–2017). Soros backed him enthusiastically in 2008, then became one of his most prominent critics from the left: he argued the 2009 stimulus was too small, that banks should have been injected with equity rather than bailed out on easier terms, and that Obama squandered the crisis's confidence multiplier — while praising his handling of Egypt and criticizing his caution toward Russia.
Profile →Economist and Political PhilosopherFriedrich Hayek
Methodological ally turned named adversary — Soros claims Hayek's anti-scientism and prosecutes his market fundamentalism
Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) was an Austrian-born economist and Nobel laureate, the century's most influential defender of the free market. Soros read the Popper–Hayek Economica debate as an LSE student and sided with Hayek's anti-scientism, but spent three decades prosecuting the market fundamentalism Hayek came to personify — most directly in his 2011 Cato Institute lecture 'Why I Agree With (Some of) Friedrich Hayek.'
Profile →EconomistJohn Maynard Keynes
Predecessor twice over — reflexivity observed avant la lettre, and Soros's standing policy authority against austerity
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) founded macroeconomics with the General Theory (1936) and designed much of the postwar monetary order at Bretton Woods. Soros places his beauty-contest market in reflexivity's genealogy, confessed at MIT in 1994 to imitating Keynes's general-theory ambition, and invokes him across two decades of crisis commentary against 1930s-style fiscal orthodoxy.
Profile →Investor, Founder of Templeton Growth FundJohn Templeton
The parallel pioneer — no documented interaction; the value-contrarian pole of the global investing tradition Soros's macro defines itself against
John Marks Templeton (1912–2008) pioneered global diversified investing from 1954, buying at the 'point of maximum pessimism' on a planetary scale. He does not appear by name anywhere in the Soros corpus; the page treats him as comparison, not connection — the archive's one documentary thread is Franklin Templeton, the firm he founded, appearing as Ukraine's largest bondholder in Soros's 2015 debt-relief essay.
Profile →Investor, Founder of Tudor Investment CorporationPaul Tudor Jones
The Alchemy's industry champion — wrote its 1987 foreword and made it required reading for Tudor's new traders
Paul Tudor Jones II (born 1954) is the founder of Tudor Investment Corporation and the archetypal discretionary macro trader of the post-Soros generation. His 1987 foreword to The Alchemy of Finance ranked it alongside Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, and Soros records that Jones requires new employees to read the book before trading — the strongest evidence that reflexivity entered the industry's working canon.
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