John Paulson

John Paulson founded Paulson & Co. as an event-driven, merger arbitrage focused fund before executing the "greatest trade ever" — building massive short positions against subprime mortgage CDOs starting in 2006 with help from Goldman Sachs (ABACUS CDO). The fund earned approximately $15 billion in 2007, reportedly $4 billion personal to Paulson. Documented in Greg Zuckerman's book "The Greatest Trade Ever". After the financial crisis, Paulson transitioned to merger arbitrage, gold investing, and other strategies with mixed results. Paulson & Co. returned outside capital in 2020 to become a family office. While subsequent strategies never replicated the magnitude of the 2007 trade, his ability to identify one of the largest structural mispricings in financial history and then scale into it with conviction remains among the most extraordinary risk-return outcomes in institutional investing.