It’s an August weekend at “Camp Soros,” a $72 million Water Mill estate, and the rosé is flowing. Models, NBA players and club kids kick it by a pool overflowing with rubber duckie floats. There’s a personal chef presiding over lobster bakes and a 20,000-square-foot mansion for games of drunken hide-and-seek (a favorite of fashion designer and sometime guest Timo Weiland).
The host with the most? Billionaire heir Alex Soros.
The son of 86-year-old investor George Soros — net worth: $24.9 billion — rented his party pad from shoe designer Vince Camuto. Overnight, it has become the hottest spot in the Hamptons — with everyone from Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova to new Knick Joakim Noah to model Caroline Vreeland snagging an invite.
Like the savvy scion he is, Alex has outsourced the lady hunting. According to Page Six, he’s charged his pal Adam Spoont, a promoter for Manhattan hot spots Gilded Lily and the Monarch Room, with model wrangling.
But those close to Alex say the 30-year-old is the Hamptons’ most unlikely playboy: working on his University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Jewish Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature,” by day and cavorting with the young and beautiful by night.
“He will be the best host,” says Maxwell Osborne, co-designer of the Public School fashion line and a close friend. “But there’s always a moment when he . . . disappears to do work.”
Unless you manage to seduce him.
“If you bring up what’s going on in Congo, you’ll see him perk up immediately,” says a longtime friend who asked to remain anonymous.
With his social life on fire, the former pudgy bookworm is ready to step out from behind his father’s shadow and make a name for himself — in Page Six, and beyond.
Growing up in Westchester County’s Katonah, “He was a very shy, . . . chubby kid,” says the friend.
Alex and his brother Gregory, now 27 and a sculptor, are the sons of George and his second wife, historian Susan Weber. (Alex has three older siblings from his father’s first marriage, to Annaliese Witschak.) The brothers attended King Low Heywood Thomas, a private school in Stamford, Conn. One classmate, who requested her name be withheld, recalls not believing that Alex was the son of a billionaire.
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“He wasn’t flashy at all,” she says, noting that Alex drove a hand-me-down Lexus SUV, wore non-designer clothes and carried a briefcase to school. He worked in the mailroom at his father’s Manhattan hedge fund during the summers.
Alex, a mediocre basketball player, would host parties for the girls’ and boys’ teams at his family’s 14-room estate.
“We called [the home] ‘Richie Rich,’ ” says his ex-schoolmate. “They had a llama farm . . . a movie theater . . . go-carts to drive around the property.”
George and Susan often left their children in the hands of their Chinese nanny, Ping.
“When [Alex and Gregory] were younger, George was very busy,” says Bill Zabel, the Soros family attorney and Alex’s godfather. “He is the kind of father who can interact with a 15-year-old much better than a 2-year-old.”
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In a 2012 interview with the New York Times, Alex admitted to having a complicated relationship with his father growing up. “I felt unwanted,” Alex told the Times. “He had a very hard time communicating love, and he was never really around.”
His parents divorced in 2005 during Alex’s first year at NYU. (In 2013, George married for a third time, to health care consultant Tamiko Bolton).
In the city, Alex’s close-knit group of childhood friends tried to protect the heir from leeches, according to the longtime pal, “but eventually, they slowly moved away and had their own lives to think about.”
The NYC scenesters pounced.
“They found out who he was and immediately tried to pull him into [the party] world,” says the longtime friend.
In 2008, the Web site Guest of a Guest featured photos of a bleary-eyed Alex partying in the Hamptons “billionaire style.”
Alex expressed his regret in the Times story at becoming a caricature of a trust-fund baby and started to clean up his act. Now in his party pics, rather than looking like a hangover in the making, he appears to be having good, clean fun.
In 2010, Alex, who declined an interview with The Post, enrolled at Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in modern European history. The following year, he joined the board of his father’s charity, Open Society Foundations, embracing causes like human rights in Africa.
Alex also cleaned up his look. He shed the extra weight. His wardrobe was spruced up with Dior suits and, once he met Osborne, Public School gear — though the designer admits he wasn’t able to break Alex from his affinity for brightly colored eyeglasses.
One woman, who was picked up by a chauffeur for a date with Alex a few years ago, recalls him discussing calories during the meal.
“He told me he used to be fat. He said, ‘This is foie gras. That’s so fattening,’ ” she said. “He still ate it though.”
With his causes and body in line, Alex was ready for the public spotlight. Almost.
“He came to me for help and said, ‘I don’t really know how to pose for pictures,’ ” says party photographer Patrick McMullan. “He was self-conscious [about party pics]. So I had him come to my studio so we could do a [practice] session.”
As Alex’s confidence grows, so does his prominence on the charity circuit. Since launching the Alexander Soros Foundation in 2012, he has donated roughly $10 million. He and his father are closer than ever.
And while he’s living it up this summer — blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on Hamptons high life — Alex is eager to settle down, according to the longtime friend. He recently purchased the apartment adjacent to his Noho pad with the future in mind.
“He said, ‘The thing I like about the place is that all the bedrooms are on one side of the house, so if I have kids, they’ll be close to me,’ ” says the friend.
But it will take more than a long pair of stems to win over the worldly heir.
“He can’t do shallow,” says the longtime friend. “It bothers him too much.”