David Einhorn

Born in 1968 in Demarest, New Jersey, Einhorn graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University in 1991. He worked as an analyst at Siegler, Collery & Co. before founding Greenlight Capital in 1996 with $900,000 in capital. Greenlight Capital employs a fundamental, value-oriented long-short equity strategy, taking long positions in undervalued companies and short positions in overvalued ones. The fund generated strong returns through the late 1990s and 2000s, with Einhorn developing a reputation for his research quality and willingness to take controversial positions. Einhorn became widely known in financial circles for his short of Allied Capital, which he described in his 2008 book Fooling Some of the People All of the Time. He alleged Allied Capital was fraudulently mismarking its loan portfolio, and conducted a multi-year public campaign against the company. Though it took years, Allied Capital eventually wrote down significant losses. His most consequential call came in April 2008 at the Ira Sohn Investment Conference, when he presented an extensive short thesis on Lehman Brothers, detailing what he saw as accounting manipulations that masked the true severity of Lehman's exposure to deteriorating real estate assets. Lehman CEO Dick Fuld defended the company, but the stock never recovered its pre-presentation levels. Lehman collapsed in September 2008, validating Einhorn's analysis. Greenlight's performance has been mixed in the 2010s and 2020s, with the fund's value orientation struggling in a market that rewarded growth companies. Einhorn has been vocal about structural problems in market structure, including the role of ETF flows and passive investing in distorting price signals.