30 Most Interesting Facts You Probably Didn't Know About David Einhorn

25 June 2019, 3:11 pm EDT By Ruby Karnick

David Einhorn, one of the Wall Street's most closely watched investors, is famously known for questioning the Lehman Brothers' books. He is often noted for continuously losing money on bets against the "bubble basket" of internet stocks. Here are some really important facts about the American investor, hedge fund manager:

He is the founder and president of Greenlight Capital, a "long-short value-oriented hedge fund."
Since the year 2013, he has been ranked by several magazines in their most influential people in the world list, as well as one of the highest earning hedge fund managers in the world.
He is also known for his contributions to various philanthropic causes, being a member of the board of The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, along with numerous other charities in the New York area.
His company Greenlight Capital donated all of the general partner's profits from the shorting of Allied Capital stock to three different organizations - Tomorrows Children's Fund, The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) in Spring 2009.
This relative came after his promise in his book "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time." The donations started in 2005, when his company donated to Tomorrows Children's Fund.
In the year 2006, he reportedly finished 18th in the World Series of Poker main event and is said to have donated his winnings of over $650,000 to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
He also donated his winnings from the 2012 World Series of Poker Big One for One Drop Tournament to City Year, an American education non-profit organization.
It was reported that he finished in the third place in the tournament winning $4,352,000, which had a million dollar buy in.
Initially, Einhorn was in negotiations to buy a minority share of the New York Mets, the baseball team for $200 million, in May 2011, with an option to buy majority stake in a period of three years.
However, the negotiations did not seem to have gone well, as the Mets announced in September 2011, that any kind of negotiations they had with Einhorn had come to an end.

Einhorn is also a founding Master Player of the Portfolios with Purpose, a registered 501(c)(3) Non-profit organization, virtual stock trading contest.
He married Cheryl Strauss, a financial reporter and media consultant, in the year 1993. The duo had three children - two daughters, Rachel and Naomi, and a son, Mitchell (Mitch).
The couple ended their relationship with a divorce in the year 2017. He currently resides in Westchester County, New York, and is known to drive a Honda Odyssey.
He filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. in a Manhattan court in an effort to have the company issue dividend-paying perpetual preferred stock as a means of distributing some of its $137 billion in cash to shareholders, in February 2013.
He called for Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, to step down after Microsoft had been passed by both Google and Apple in market value on May 26, 2011.
David M. Einhorn was born on November 20, 1968 to Stephen Einhorn and Nancy Einhorn in New Jersey. He has one brother named Daniel.
He was initially raised in Demarest, New Jersey, before his family moved to Wisconsin when he was only seven years old.
His father Stephen Einhorn is the founder and president of Einhorn & Associates, a consulting firm, and Capital Midwest Fund, a venture capital fund.
In the year 1991, he graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Government from the College of Arts and Sciences from Cornell University.
During his time at Cornell, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Following his graduation at Cornell, he moved to Westchester, New York to start his fund.

Five years later, he started Greenlight Capital with $900,000 and has generated 16.5% annualized return for investors from the year 1996 to 2016.
Einhorn gave a speech in May 2002, at the Sohn Investment Research Conference, recommending to short a mid-cap financial company called Allied Capital.
He went on to disclose that he himself had a substantial short position. He alleged that the company was defrauding the Small Business Administration. The next day the company's stock went down by 20 percent.
Allied accused Einhorn of engaging in market manipulation. After around six years of investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it was found that the company indeed broke securities laws relating to the accounting and valuation of illiquid securities.
His bibliography "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time," was published in the year 2010, about his six-year fight with Allied Capital.
His book was generally met with positive reviews, with Seeking Alpha saying that the book had every single last detail related to the case laid out, while also proving that the truth is really stranger than fiction.
He and his company Greenlight Capital was fined $11.2 million by the U.K. Financial Services Authority (FSA) for trading on inside information in January 2012.
The said fine was the second largest levied on an individual in the history of Britain's Financial Services Authority. Einhorn claimed the fine to be "unjust" and "inconsistent with the law" but that he would pay it "rather than continue an arduous fight."
He reportedly shorted Lehman Brothers stock in July 2007, in the belief that Lehman had massive exposures to illiquid real estate investments that were improperly accounted for.
He announced his Lehman short position at a conference in April, 2008. The next month, he, his staff members along with Lehman's CFO Erin Callan held a private teleconference, following which, Einhorn publicly characterized Callan's responses in a negative light. Lehman's stock fell sharply, leading to a $2.8 billion quarterly loss. In September 2008, Lehman declared bankruptcy.