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American businessman (born 1961)
Daniel Seth Loeb is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is the founder and chief executive of Third Point, a New York-based hedge fund focused on event-driven, value-oriented investing with $4 billion in assets under management, as of December 2023. New York magazine noted that Loeb's "preferred strategy" is to buy into troubled companies, which "is the key to his success." Regarding his active involvement in the companies in which he invests, Loeb was described as "one of the most successful activists" in 2014.
Loeb is the son of Ronald and Clare (née Spark) Loeb. He is a descendant of rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. He was raised in Santa Monica, California, where he attended Palisades Charter High School. There he took AP classes, started a skateboard company, and was nicknamed "Milo Minderbinder" by one of his teachers (after a character in the novel Catch-22 who had a fascination with the stock market). His father was a partner at the Los Angeles law firm of Irell & Manella LLP and general counsel for Williams-Sonoma, Inc. Ronald Loeb also served as an outside director of Mattel, Inc. for over 30 years and during one period became interim president of Mattel. Clare Loeb, his mother, is a historian and independent scholar. Loeb's great-aunt, Ruth Handler, created the Barbie doll and co-founded Mattel Inc. Loeb attended the University of California, Berkeley for two years and subsequently graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1983. At Columbia, he was a classmate of future President Barack Obama, whose presidential campaign he later offered significant financial support. By his senior year at Columbia, Loeb had made $120,000 in the stock market, but lost it all on an investment in a firm called Puritan-Bennett Inc. The loss taught him a lesson, he later said, in "overconcentrating positions".
From 1984 to 1987, Loeb worked at private equity firm Warburg Pincus. He then worked as director of corporate development at Island Records, a record label, where he focused on securing debt financing. After Island Records, Loeb worked as a risk arbitrage analyst at Lafer Equity Investors and then, from 1991 to 1994, as senior vice-president in the distressed debt department at Jefferies LLC, where he focused on bankruptcy analysis, trading bank loans and selling distressed securities. He moved on to become a Citigroup vice president from 1994 to 1995, in charge of high-yield bond sales.
According to Forbes, his net worth is $3.5 billion as of April 2021.
Loeb is an advocate for criminal justice reform and helps fund the Marshall Project, a nonprofit online journalism group, and the Brennan Center's Innocence Project. He is concerned with those unfairly imprisoned and successfully pushed for the release of Bernard Noble in April 2018, who served more than 7 years in prison for possessing two marijuana joints.
Loeb married Margaret Davidson Munzer on July 4, 2004, at his beach house in East Hampton, New York. The couple has three children. Loeb is a founding "Master Player" of Portfolios with Purpose, an annual virtual stock trading contest that raises money for charitable causes of the winning contestants' choice. In 2014, Loeb was reported as one of a number of "prominent investors [who] have taken to Transcendental Meditation". Loeb was co-chair of the Governors for Investors Industry (2013). He is a Trustee of Mount Sinai Health System, the Manhattan Institute, the U.S. Olympic Committee and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the National Council of the American Enterprise Institute. Loeb sat on the Board of Directors of Sotheby's and was the chair of the Board of the Success Academy charter network.
Biographical detail compiled from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are edited openly and may be incomplete or out of date. Fleet data is our own. Source →
