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--Moved by his parents' death and the belief that most Americans die badly, he created the Project on Death in America, to which he has committed $20 million in an attempt to improve the care of the dying and to bring death out of the closet.
--In Baltimore, Md., he is shelling out $25 million to set up an office of his Open Society Institute to see if there is synergy to be gained from applying many of his different programs in one place. "I'm sure, whatever he focuses on, it will help," says Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. "It will have to be well targeted, because $25 million is both a lot and a little. A lot if you focus on a limited number of problems; a little if you try and go after all the problems of urban America."
Outside of the temples of high finance, Soros was almost unknown until the early 1990s. On Wall Street he is judged the greatest hedge-fund investor of our time. With characteristic candor, he says he "carved myself a place on Mount Rushmore as a money manager." An investment of $100,000 with Soros in 1969 would be worth $300 million today.
Born the son of a Hungarian Jewish lawyer in 1930, Soros was a boy when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. They rounded up all the Jews they could find and murdered most of them in concentration camps. Soros survived only because his father--who had lived through the Russian Revolution--knew that this was a time to disobey orders. He bought the family false identity papers and places to live and hide.
Nonetheless, Soros has said 1944 was the happiest year of his life: "I had a father whom I adored, who was in command of the situation, who knew what to do and who helped others. We were in mortal danger, but I was convinced I was exempt. I learned the art of survival from a grand master. That has had a certain relevance to my investment career."
After leaving Soviet-controlled Hungary for London in 1947, Soros fell under the spell of a college professor, the philosopher Karl Popper. It was Popper who coined the term open society--meaning one in which argument and debate are encouraged, the opposite of a dictatorship, which claims an ultimate truth but derives it only through force. Soros' approach to investing, indeed his whole life, is informed by Popper's work.
It was from Popper that Soros gained his personal philosophy of reflexivity. It boils down to the sensible if not entirely original idea that people always act on the basis of imperfect knowledge or understanding; that while they may seek the truth--in the financial markets, law or everyday life--they'll never quite reach it, because the very act of looking distorts the picture. He says he has used this theory to try "to turn the disparate elements of my existence into a coherent whole."
Soros found the market for his philosophy to be rather thin, and eventually turned to banking. In 1956 he moved to the U.S. By the end of the '60s he had delved into the obscure discipline of arbitrage--a branch of financial physics that involves buying and selling securities in different markets in order to skim profits off the transactions. He discovered that a lot of money was to be made by moving money around the world to profit on the rise and fall of currencies.