John Arnold

John Arnold worked as an energy trader at Enron, where he earned over $750 million in bonuses in 2001 before the company collapsed. He founded Centaurus Energy as a natural gas hedge fund in 2002 and built it to over $4 billion in assets through discretionary energy trading. He retired from trading in 2012 at age 38 and redirected his wealth to Arnold Ventures (with his wife Laura), focused on evidence-based policy reform in criminal justice, health care, K-12 education, and municipal pension reform. Arnold is considered one of the most innovative philanthropists of his generation. His decision to retire from trading at 38 — walking away from one of the most profitable commodity trading operations in the world — and to redirect his wealth toward evidence-based public policy reform stands as one of the most distinctive career transitions in modern finance, applying the analytical rigor of trading to social problems with the same intellectual discipline.