Seth A. Klarman

"Mr. Klarman is President of The Baupost Group, L.L.C. Founded in 1982, Baupost discretionarily manages $15 billion for a number of institutional and wealthy individual investors. Baupost uses a value discipline with an event-driven bias to find global opportunities in such diverse areas as publicly-traded and private equities, bankrupt and financially-distressed debt, and real estate. Seth has managed Baupost’s investments from inception. Baupost’s largest partnership vehicle has achieved net annual return to investors of just over 20% and has experienced only one money-losing year since it was formed in 1983. Seth is a 1982 MBA graduate of Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. He received his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in Economics from Cornell University in 1979. In 1991, he wrote a now out of print book entitled Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor, which sells for $1,200 on Amazon and $2,000 on eBay and has been stolen from most libraries. Seth is also a world-class worrier. In one letter, Mr. Klarman said, At Baupost, we are big fans of fear, and in investing, it is clearly better to be scared than sorry. In an earlier note, he wrote, Rather than ratchet up risk, our approach has been to hold cash in the absence of opportunity. Seth serves on several not-for-profit boards and lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts with his wife and three children. "

Liberal Hawk
Philip Weiss, of MondoWeiss, points out that Klarman donates millions to the well-recognized liberal organizations, but at the same time he donates millions to some of the hawkiest right-wing organizations in Israel:
 * Klarman gives money to settler groups: the Central Fund of Israel,which pays for settlers' "security needs" in the occupied West Bank, and Ir David, which is digging up East Jerusalem and displacing Palestinians. He gives $1 million in a year to Birthright, the program to send young American Jews to Israel to fall in love with the Jewish state. He supports the rightwing propaganda organization, the Israel Project (he's on their board), gives big money to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, and to top it off, Klarman is chairman of the board of the David Project, the group that has targeted Arab and Muslim intellectuals on college campuses. Klarman epitomizes the foreign-policy crisis of the liberal Establishment: he supports every traditional liberal cause at the same time as he is a rightwinger on Middle East policy. And he's hardly alone. I've written about other big liberal philanthropists who swing right on Israel here.

Affiliations

 * Chair, Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation
 * Director, The Israel Project
 * David Project – Chairman of the Board