罗伯特·梅克’s Trade of the Century

唐纳德·特朗普’s shocking presidential election win in 2016 could arguably be credited to the financial largesse of one person: Robert Mercer, the brilliant and reclusive former co-chief executive of the legendary hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. The 2020 election cycle could not have been more different, however. The hedge fund executive, who stepped down from his post at RenTec in 2018 but still works at the firm as a technical researcher, made a large donation to the Republican National Committee this year — but he has donated just $5,600 to Trump’s reelection campaign. Here is a look back at how he indelibly shaped the campaign four years ago.

在文艺复兴技术的午餐 - 纽约东塞托托托吉克的秘密，320亿美元的量化对冲基金 - 长期以来一直是公共事件。

在一个稀疏的用餐室，俯瞰着一条树点缀的长岛草坪，计算机科学家和数学家开发了文艺复兴时期的交易算法，聚集在熟食店上用餐和瓶装水。谈话通常倾向于平凡的工作日Chatter：儿童，假期，运动。然而，在这个偏远的50英亩环境中，远离曼哈顿金融区和康涅狄格州的对冲基金排，一个人 - Co-Ceo Robert Mercer - 脱颖而出，表达了一个奇异的激情：政治。

Former colleagues say Mercer’s ultraconservative, free-market, antigovernment opinions make him unique among the millionaires and occasional billionaire who sit around that table. His views touch upon such varied and controversial topics as support for climate change deniers, a return to the gold standard, and the extreme free-market Austrian economics and individualism popularized by Ayn Rand.

Mercer也长期以来对克林顿举行了强烈的观点。

“他认为Bill Clinton是一个罪犯，我相信他仍然是，”努力工作的Nick Patterson说Renaissance直到2001年，1993年建议聘请来自IBM公司的聘请Mercer，Mercer获得了他对计算机语言学的突破性工作，以及彼得·棕色，也将加入文艺复兴。这两者在2009年退休后成为了合作社的合作中心。（西蒙斯为他的一部分，最近告诉CNBC，他和Mercer没有讨论政治。）

在1990年代,帕特森矩形alls, Mercer often railed against then-president Clinton, continually referring to a murky alleged land deal in Arkansas that had followed the former governor to the White House. Like many of the scandals surrounding the Clintons, there was more smoke than fire: Whitewater turned out to be little more than fodder for right-wing talk shows and, apparently, Renaissance lunches.

Mercer的观点随着时间的推移没有软化。在巴拉克奥巴马时代 - 当对冲基金在全球金融危机之后获得了更多审查的人民，追求Mercer家族基金会的Mercer和他的女儿Rebekah，悄悄地利用了他的大量财富和技术娴熟，以进一步促进他们的政策和政治目标。其中主要是：在追求主席的追求中击败希拉里克林顿。

他成功地反对巨大的赔率，必须非常令人愉悦到70岁。首次支持参议员TED Cruz然后唐纳德特朗普，Mercer举行了赌注 - 在经济上和情感上 - 在两名男子上被淘汰的政治机构。他继续支持最终的胜利者通过最大的竞选深度，以及他在这个赌注中的他的对冲基金同行中仅仅孤单地站立的意愿，必须使11月8日的结果更加令人满意 - 当唐纳德特朗普被宣布时更加令人满意winner of the presidential election late that night, the greatest trade of Robert Mercer’s life paid off.

梅克凯将成为特朗普的王者似乎令人惊讶，因为大亨的不安赢得了自己。在这个选举周期Mercer之前在政界中几乎不为人知。现在，他已成为与查尔斯和大卫·科赫（David Koch）有关的力量，他们多年来已经支持共和党候选人并带来了大量支票簿。

Though he has done so quietly, Mercer has over time helped finance nearly 100 candidates for national office. There also have been sizable bets on technology to mold public opinion against Clinton and for Republicans — technology that both critics and supporters say was critical to Trump’s success.

自2010年以来，Mercer将4500万美元的竞选捐赠（仅在2016年的2500万美元）中，超过5000万美元的税前捐款到超法非营利组织。他在其他政治导向投资中估计了1500万美元。其中包含的是争议网站Breitbart.com的1000万美元投资，这是史蒂夫·佛顿·史蒂夫·佛顿（Steve Bannon）的争议网站成为他所谓的“Alt Right”的平台 - 是一个公开种族选区的最重要的翼翼。此外，Mercer的基金会资助了一个呼吁政府责任学院的非营利组织，其总统在克林顿基金会上写了一本采用有争议的2015年图书。Mercer还将500万美元投入剑桥分析，这是一个数据挖掘和行为科学公司，这些公司表示，它使用社交媒体的分析，在2016年选举中针对难以捉摸的愤怒的摇摆状态选民。

甚至像帕特森这样的自由主义者，现在在广泛的麻省理工学院和哈佛大学，对男人勉强思考。“让我们给鲍勃一些信誉，”他说。“假设你想做的主要是击败希拉里。他是一个非常聪明的家伙。这非常清楚特朗普先生和班森和·克森和慈善人员对美国的一些事情理解了一些事情。“

然而，在特朗普的胜利中，批评者骇人听闻的胜利，梅凯似乎更像是一个小说的恶棍。“If there is a dark, dystopian evil overlord behind everything that Trump has accomplished, it’s Robert Mercer,” says Michael Kink, a top Democratic activist who worked on the congressional campaign of Zephyr Teachout, a progressive congressional candidate in New York who was defeated by a Mercer-backed Republican in November.

Mercer的努力的高潮不仅仅是特朗普和其他共和党人的选举。Mercer的女儿，Rebekah（称为Bekah）已经被政治家命名为Gop中最有权势的女人。她在特朗普的过渡团队中，两位Mercer资助的伙伴们，Bannon和Kellyanne Conway，在加入据报道的竞选活动中加入了Mercers的发行时，最终可能会在白宫。Bannon已经被命名为特朗普的首席白宫战略家。

Both Mercers will continue to have在特朗普政府的影响根据里面的那些。根据特朗普转型团队成员的说法，他们靠近Bannon和Trump的女婿，Jared Kushner - 两名总统依赖大多数人Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge Capital。强调新发现的近距离，特朗普在12月3日在Mercer的家中举行的“英雄和恶棍”的圣诞派对出现了外观（伴随着康威，穿着女超级衣服）。据报道，贝卡·梅克在特朗普对几个白宫岗位的艰难选择中有影响力，包括阿拉巴马州参议员杰夫·杰夫会议，授权书长和退休的中尉迈克尔·弗林·国家安全顾问。在参加Mercer派对后的一天，特朗普宣布他会采访约翰·博尔顿 - 马兜铃前布什副州的州和Bekah Mercer报道的挑选 - 为国家秘书的职位。

在一个秘密对冲基金Moguls的世界中，Robert Mercer是最受欢迎的之一 - 他与他现在运行的基金共享的特质。

美世是知之甚少的背景支持vides insight into his political views. He was born in California and raised in New Mexico, the son of now-deceased Virginia and Thomas Mercer. His father, a scientist whose research at Albuquerque’s Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research was financed by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1960s, died in 1993 at age 72, two years older than his son is now. (A prize in the father’s name is now granted by the American Association for Aerosol Research, which has received $25,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation.)

虽然文艺复兴时期有点聊天，但美克在外面的世界里奇怪地害羞。At two Hamptons fundraisers this summer, held at the homes of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and financier Wilbur Ross (Trump’s current choice for Commerce secretary), the hedge fund manager was in the background, making small talk with other Trump donors, says Scaramucci. “He was incredibly cordial and gentlemanly,” the SkyBridge founder adds.

“Bob is fairly reserved,” says Patterson, recalling that at Renaissance Mercer “worked very, very hard. He’s probably not the guy you’d want to go to a party with.”

Mercer几乎从不与新闻界谈话（并拒绝接受本文的采访）。在罕见的2014年公共地址时，在获得计算机语言学中的一终终身工作的终身成就奖时，Mercer谈到了一个40分钟的谈话与自我贬低的言论，呈现出狡猾的幽默感，据说他的描述是“cold blooded poker player” in Sebastian Mallaby’s 2010 hedge fund exposé,比上帝更多的钱。

说他只是一位电脑程序员，灰色发型的Mercer轻轻地谈到了他的爱情与计算机的爱情如何，从十岁开始。后来，在新墨西哥大学的一名学生的凯特兰空军基地武器实验室工作，他得到了对政府的第一次厌恶。当Mercer学会在百分之一的时间运行计算时，“那些”的权力被要求他召回了100次运行程序。“我认为这是一个教训，即政府资助的研究最重要的目标之一是为了获得答案而不是消耗计算机预算，”他在计算语言学协会中告诉人群。“自从与政府资助的研究的华润观点以来，它留下了我。”

收到他的博士后。在1972年从伊利诺伊大学的计算机科学，Mercer在IBM加入了他一代的其他大脑。然而，在文艺复兴时期，他似乎已经找到了自由市场狂热的完美现货：该公司在纯粹的大脑和计算能力背面生产了许多百万富翁，是最基本的资本主义。然而，在另一个意义上，Mercer是一个与他的新同事赔率有可能的人：创始人西蒙斯和共同首席执行官棕色都是坚定的民主党人，前者是最近选举周期的最高民主捐助者之一。另一方面，梅克尔与前保守的总统候选人和亚利桑那州参议员巴里Goldwater比与东海岸的社会自由洛克菲勒共和党人一致。事实上，通过他的家庭基金会Mercer向Goldwater Institut捐赠了950,000美元。他还授予Cato Institute，联邦主义学会，遗产基金会和曼哈顿政策研究所，以及其他保守群体。

政治差异使得无需抑制文艺复兴的成功。自1982年推出以来，该公司已经积累了任何对冲基金的最高回报，其奖章基金现在完全管理其员工的财富，生产年度归还约35％。该基金的招聘配方是，而且简单：西蒙斯通常招募科学家和数学家，所有与博士，开发算法交易的程序。然而，结果并不简单：文艺复兴的奖章策略对外人来说仍然是不透明的。

The main glitch in the firm’s reputation has been a 2014 accusation by the U.S. Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations that Medallion’s returns weren’t the result of pure brilliance. Instead, the committee asserted, they came from leverage that in some cases approached nearly 20-to-1, sidestepping Federal Reserve margin rules, and a tax strategy allowing the fund to pay long-term capital gains taxes on short-term gains. The Senate investigation found Renaissance had earned more than $30 billion through the strategy and avoided $6.8 billion in taxes. The firm is still under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, which began to crack down on the strategy in 2010. In a statement at the time of the Senate probe, Renaissance said: “We believe that the tax treatment for the option transactions being reviewed by the [permanent subcommittee investigation] is appropriate under current law. These options provide Renaissance with substantial business benefits regardless of their duration.”

Apart from Medallion, the firm has launched three funds for institutional investors over the years (one was closed following poor returns). These funds take a longer-term view of investing and do not avail themselves of the leverage and tax benefits available to Medallion. Understandably, their returns aren’t nearly as good as Medallion’s, but quantitative funds are once again in fashion, and the $14 billion Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF), the largest of the firm’s institutional funds, was up 14.8 percent for 2016 through November. It has annualized returns of about 10 percent since its launch in 2005.

As long as Renaissance’s investors are happy with the fund’s performance, they may care little about the polarized politics of the firm’s leaders. That said, Mercer’s outsize role in the election of President Trump is garnering protest from those who want public pension funds to get out of Renaissance. “People have to take a deep look into their checkbooks and their souls to see whether they want to support people with these kind of views,” says Stephen Lerner, a labor strategist who is a fellow at Georgetown University and also associated with activist group Hedge Clippers. He says Hedge Clippers has been reinvigorated by Trump’s election and plans to take its campaign of divestment to all the pensions and foundations invested in RIEF, telling亚博赞助欧冠: “At some point, in addition to fees and returns, there is the question of assisted suicide. If somebody’s political ideology is to destroy you, it seems that’s a bad investment.” According to alternative-assets data firm Preqin, RIEF’s investors include the Oprah Winfrey Charitable Foundation, the Public School Retirement System of Missouri, and the Employee Retirement System of the City of Providence. None returned calls for comment.

在Mercer 2010年提升到棕色到文艺复兴时期的最佳工作之后，他已经大量的财富变得更大：他已经制作了Institutional Investor’s Alpha’s最多付的对冲基金经理名单在过去的五年中，赚取6亿美元。

Mercer的海拔和积累，恰逢努力在华尔街中加强努力，增加最富有的美国人的税率。他们还与Mercer的个人哲学更加一致的活动恰逢：美国最高法院裁决Citizens Unitedv.联邦选举委员会有效,这一决定allowed unlimited contributions to political campaigns. (Robert Mercer is a contributor to Citizens United, a conservative political nonprofit.)

The hedge fund executive’s political efforts soon included financing opponents of progressive Democrats, such as Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio in 2010. DeFazio wanted to tax all stock transactions, a populist idea that has been tossed around for decades and got renewed but short-lived support following the financial crisis. Such a tax would be anathema to Renaissance given the firm’s short-term trading strategy: It holds thousands of investments, some for only seconds. Arthur Robinson, a quirky individual whose Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine stockpiles human urine and attacks the scientific consensus on climate change, says he has run against DeFazio four times thanks to Mercer’s generous financial backing of both his campaign and his institute. Robinson says he and the hedge funder agree on politics and believe that some of the biggest problems the U.S. faces are “taxes and regulations suppressing free enterprise.” Robinson, however, has lost every election he has run against DeFazio, who maintains his seat in Congress.

In the 2016 election Mercer financed dozens of congressional Republicans, including Kelli Ward, a Republican primary opponent of Arizona Senator John McCain. McCain easily beat the challenge but made it clear that he considered it payback for his role as chairman of the subcommittee that investigated Renaissance’s taxes. “We issued a scathing report about this guy evading taxes, his firm. I’m sure there’s no connection of a $600,000 injection into the Kelli Ward campaign,” McCain told Politico this summer, tongue firmly in cheek.

In the 2016 presidential race, Mercer initially backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who shared the mogul’s distaste for big government (and wanted to abolish the IRS). It was a controversial and ideological pick that distanced Mercer from other major hedge fund donors, like Elliott Management Corp.’s Paul Singer, who supported Marco Rubio, a top choice of the Republican establishment.

But Mercer didn’t just give money to candidates and let their campaigns do the rest of the work. Just as Renaissance used financial leverage to amplify its returns, Mercer applied the formula to political capital. His first foray was to put $10 million into a struggling Breitbart News in 2011. The website’s reputation began to soar later that year, when it exposed then–New York congressman Anthony Weiner’s first sexting scandal. In 2016 Bannon told Bloomberg he had hired trackers to follow Weiner’s Twitter account 24 hours a day; they eventually uncovered the politician’s now-infamous underwear photos. It may have been the first time social media played a major role in undoing a candidate — and a harbinger of what was to come.

After founder Andrew Breitbart died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took control of Breitbart.com, soon opening the site to commentary by so-called alt-right extremists, who have expressed anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, sexist, racist, and white supremacist views on the site. The strategy has been controversial, but SkyBridge’s Scaramucci stands by it. “Breitbart has simply become a blogging site for individual liberty and expression,” he argues.

A number of Breitbart staffers didn’t see it that way. Several quit during the 2016 Republican primary campaign, contending that the site had gone beyond Andrew Breitbart’s goal of providing a conservative news alternative to the liberal media. Instead, they believed, it had turned into a propaganda tool. “It became an extension of the political campaign for Donald Trump,” says Kurt Bardella, CEO of Endeavor Strategies, a PR firm that represented Breitbart for two years; he left in protest this spring.

据他人的前同事帕特森（Breiteague Patterson）表示，罗伯特·梅克不分享Breitbart的极端观点，他们认为这项投资是战略性的。“我并不试图捍卫布里特巴特，但如果你的主要目标是击败希拉里克林顿，你就会做你所要做的事，”他说。

Less than two years after investing in Breitbart, Mercer amplified his publishing efforts. In 2013 and 2014 his family foundation gave $2 million to the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, whose stated mission is “to investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies and other governmental corruption or malfeasance,” according to its website. During those years the institute had close ties to both Mercer and Breitbart: Bekah Mercer sat on its board, Steve Bannon was chairman, and Breitbart senior contributor Peter Schweizer, who has written several conservative books, was president.

In the spring of 2015, Schweizer’s blockbusterClinton现金：外国政府和企业如何以及为何帮助使得富国和希拉里富有的无尽故事was published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins. It quickly became aNew York Timesbest seller and was made into a movie. Schweizer drew on reams of data from the deep web that is not accessible by regular Google searches to build his case of Clinton corruption, using sophisticated European computers he accessed for free, according to Bloomberg. Soon after publication, however, the author and publisher were forced to retract and correct numerous errors, such as quoting fake-news websites. Critics, including the Clinton campaign, pointed out that many of Schweizer’s conclusions were either false or unsubstantiated. According to the华尔街日报那the book led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the foundation, although the FBI did not find enough evidence to recommend criminal charges.

今天，Bannon和Mercer都没有被列为非营利组织网站上的董事会成员，并且Schweizer在几次面试中表示，特朗普也应该调查利益冲突。

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Mercer’s political activity is his $5 million investment in Cambridge Analytica — a deal that board member Bannon reportedly helped broker. Spun off in 2013 by U.K.-based SCL Group expressly to work in American politics, the company combines data mining and behavioral analysis. (Among SCL’s most notable recent achievements was its work on the Brexit Leave campaign in the U.K.)

剑桥分析器表示，它使用其大量的计算机编程能力来构建每个选民的型材，挖掘社交媒体帖子，包括Facebook测验等事情和其他消费者行为。然后，它针对具有旨在使他们投票给特定候选人的民意调查的个人。在总统竞选活动中为特朗普工作，它专注于密歇根州，威斯康星州和宾夕法尼亚州的特定地区，为最终赢家投诉他们的选票。

Matt Oczkowski, who led the company’s team on the Trump campaign, says Cambridge Analytica was hired to quantify the “Trump effect” and determine how a Trump voter was different from a regular Republican. Through the firm’s research it discovered that Trump supporters self-identified as disenfranchised; their top issues were immigration, trade, and law and order. As early votes came in, Oczkowski began to see that most Trump voters were white, over 65, and living in rural areas; this led Cambridge Analytica to target such voters in swing states. “The key to our success was finding these elusive Trump voters to make the difference onelection day，“ 他说。

The effort has been criticized by some data scientists. “Where the Obama and Clinton campaigns were identifying undecided voters, Trump was about finding people they knew they could rile up and get them to go to the polls,” according to Samuel Woolley, director of research for the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda project. Woolley attended a Cambridge Analytica presentation at the Republican National Convention this past summer.

剑桥在44—美国共和党campaigns in 2014 and 50 in 2016. In the presidential race it initially worked for Cruz, whose win in Iowa was attributed largely to the company’s targeting of voters with controversial “psychographic” techniques that developed a personality for every individual. (Oczkowski says they didn’t have time to create personality types for the Trump campaign.)

当Cruz失去提名的提名时，Mercer迅速搬到了特朗普营地，并将德克萨斯队失败失败了。他们说服特朗普在7月和8月收到了特朗普竞选中收到了350,000美元的费用。Mercers还介入并说服了特朗普加入Bannon和Conway，他在8月份向他的竞选活动进行了克鲁兹的政治行动委员会。然后，PAC被重新命名失败弯曲的希拉里PAC。

甚至是臭名昭着的Access Hollywoodvideotape did nothing to deter the Mercers from their ultimate goal of securing the White House for Republicans. In a statement that included thinly veiled attacks on the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton’s past sexual history, the father-daughter Mercer duo said on October 8, “We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio,” noting that the “media and political elite do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on November 8th. We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it. We, and Americans across the country and around the world, stand steadfastly behind Donald J. Trump.”

A campaign ethics watchdog, the Campaign Legal Center, believes the Mercers went too far. It is calling on the Federal Election Commission to investigate their decision to install Conway and Bannon into the campaign because, it alleges, FEC filings show that the two were not paid by the campaign but, either directly or indirectly, by Mercer’s PAC. Political action committees are not allowed to coordinate directly with political candidates, including financing their campaigns. The Mercer PAC has denied the allegations.

There is little doubt that Robert Mercer is a passionate conservative determined to upend the political order and bring his brand of conservatism to power. But so are many people. What sets Mercer apart from the many small- and large-scale donors dotting the American political landscape, both friends and critics say, is his sophisticated understanding of computer science and how such expertise can be applied to democratic elections.

文艺复兴科技公司的强大的计算机数据挖掘的模式，告知其投资，寻找它称之为幽灵模式 - 非常喜欢的方式剑桥的analytica发现害羞特朗普选民的帮助在大选中获胜，数据科学家们说。“Mercer关于阅读大规模数据集和送达内容的相同技术很容易应用于运行新闻网站或将邮件跨Facebook获取到目标受众，”Philip Howard，在牛津互联网上携带摩尔利的数据社会学家研究所。

Mercer’s former colleague Patterson agrees that the hedge fund manager easily understands the value of sophisticated computer programming, including its potential impact on politics. As a computer scientist, Mercer always had very clear objectives and was “unusually systematic” about achieving them, Patterson says. Nonetheless, “I would never have dreamt when I was talking to him in the 1990s that Bob was going to have a major influence on the national stage.” Mercer was usually a civil, if fervent, debater for his political positions at those lunches, Patterson remembers. On occasion, however, he would get “quite angry” when others disagreed with his views.

在支持特朗普，Robert Mercer选择了偶数。尽管同伴对他的立场反对，但他向他的信仰嫁给了他几乎奇异的独特技能 - 而且赢了。“如果你有一座投票数据并正在进行分析，Bob Mercer将是您团队中的一个非常好的人，”帕特森说。也许他的赌注，被这么多被视为极其风险，毕竟不是这么长的镜头。•