The Price of Passion (Life is like a jar of marbles)
“Does it make any sense to sit inside all day in front of a machine, making money I don’t need so I can give it to someone I don’t know?" - Leon Cooperman
Stanley Druckenmiller, 71 years old, still starts his day at 4 am. “I immediately go to the Bloomberg,” he said on a recent podcast. “I make a cup of coffee … check all the markets... I take a shower, go to work, start all over again.”
Druckenmiller is worth an estimated $7 billion. Clearly, he no longer plays for money. The market is his passion, his sport. He thinks being “overly competitive” is the hallmark of great money managers. His advice to youngsters? Only enter the game if you love it. “If they're going in it for the money, they should go elsewhere,” he said. “There's too many people in the business like me that just love the game.”
But he also called his competitive streak “a sickness, a disease.” His mentor George Soros once compared his fund to a parasite sucking his blood and draining his energy. Was the fund a vehicle of his success, he wondered, or had he become the fund’s slave?
What is the point of passionately outworking everyone if you end up hating what you once loved? Some investors refuse to retire, but others seem to get consumed by the game. Legends like Soros, Peter Lynch, and Julian Robertson burned out. Even Druckenmiller nearly quit after blowing up during the dot-com bubble. Only a half-year sabbatical gave him the perspective for a comeback trade. What is the price of this passion?
I was reminded of an anecdote that had long confused me. In 2022, the Washington Post profiled retired hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman. The self-made billionaire was worried about the backlash against capitalism and the rich. This article was his soapbox. “I could buy a Picasso for a hundred million,” he told a group of college students, “but it doesn’t turn me on, so then what?”
His answer was philanthropy. “It’s been my pledge, and my wife’s pledge, to give it all away,” he said. “Other than my family, writing checks is the most meaningful thing I do,” he wrote in his memoir From The Bronx To Wall Street. “We live a very rational lifestyle. What better use is there for our money?”
Fair enough. But I was baffled by some of his “very rational” lifestyle choices. First, he moved to Florida to lower his tax rate. Then the “retired” money manager spent his days “anchored to the chair in his office, monitoring the market and calling in to his trading desk again and again.” Not only was he working, but he seemed miserable.
“Does it make any sense?” he asked himself, watching the numbers change on his screen. “To sit inside all day in front of a machine, making money I don’t need so I can give it to someone I don’t know?” — The moral calculations of a billionaire
Well, does it? Does this man look happy?
But who am I to judge? I may sit at my desk with the same where the fuck did it all go wrong? kind of face.