Shaw is the founder and majority owner of D.E. Shaw & Co., an investment group and quantitative hedge fund manager. The New York-based firm employs 1,900 people and has more than $60 billion in assets under management. Shaw's the chief scientist at D.E. Shaw Research and a research fellow at Columbia University.
Shaw's fortune was built through the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co., which he founded in 1988. The hedge fund managed more than $60 billion in June 2023, according to its website, and specializes in investing using quantitative methods and proprietary computational technology.
Shaw is estimated to have earned more than $7 billion from the firm since 2005, based on an analysis of firm returns and reporting from Institutional Investor, the Financial Times and Bloomberg. These cumulative earnings are adjusted for known spending and estimated taxes, and are believed to be invested both within D.E. Shaw as well as outside the firm.
Shaw sold 20% of his ownership in the hedge fund in 2007 to Lehman Brothers for $775 million, based on a report by the Wall Street Journal that cited a price between $750 million and $800 million without disclosing its source. This money has been adjusted for taxes and market performance since as cash and other assets, less outflows for charity and real estate.
The billionaire is credited with owning about 63% of the hedge fund company, based on a July 2023 Form ADV disclosure that places his ownership between 50% and 75%. The hedge fund is valued based on assets under management of $60 billion, based on the firm's disclosed June. 1, 2023 assets on its website, and a 10% liquidity discount, and compared to the price-to-AUM of publicly traded hedge funds peers.
Randall Whitestone, a representative of DE Shaw, declined to comment on Shaw's net worth.
David E. Shaw is founder of quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, San Diego, and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1980. He taught at Columbia University until 1986, when he decided to pursue computational finance, according to a biography of the billionaire on the D.E. Shaw website in July 2019.
Shaw then joined Morgan Stanley and went on to become vice president of technology for two years, before founding his firm in 1988. He stepped down from active management of the hedge fund in 2001, electing to devote his time to his research in the field of computational biochemistry. He's now chief scientist for D.E. Shaw Research and a senior research fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University, and an Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia's medical school. The hedge fund is managed by a five person executive team, while the billionaire remains active in strategic firm decisions, according to the website biography.
The billionaire lives in Hastings-On-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Beth Kobliner Shaw.