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American computer scientist, businessman and funder of right-wing causes
Robert Leroy Mercer is an American hedge fund manager, computer scientist, and political donor. Mercer was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer and is the former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.
Mercer grew up in New Mexico. He developed an early interest in computers and in 1964 attended a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia where he learned to program a donated IBM computer. He went on to get a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the University of New Mexico. While working on his degree, he had a job at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base writing programs where, though he felt he produced good work, he felt it was not optimized. He later said the experience left him with a "jaundiced view" of government-funded research. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972.
Mercer and his wife Diana Lynne Dean have three daughters: Jennifer ("Jenji"), Rebekah ("Bekah"), and Heather Sue. Rebekah runs the Mercer Family Foundation. The three Mercer daughters formerly owned a bakery called Ruby et Violette. Mercer plays competitive poker and owns an HO scale model railroad. In 2009, Mercer filed suit against RailDreams Custom Model Railroad Design, alleging that RailDreams overcharged him by $2 million. Mercer lives at "Owl's Nest" mansion in Head of the Harbor, New York. He has commissioned a series of yachts, all named Sea Owl. The most recent one is 203 feet (62 metres) in length, and has a pirate-themed playroom for Mercer's grandchildren and a chandelier of Venetian glass. In Florida, Mercer built a large stable and horse riding center. He has acquired one of the country's largest collections of machine guns and historical firearms, including a weapon Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in The Terminator. In 2013, Mercer was sued by several members of his household staff, who accused him of docking their wages and failing to pay overtime compensation. The lawsuit was settled, according to a lawyer who represented the staff members. Mercer's net worth is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, and he is often referred to as a billionaire.
Mercer joined IBM Research in the fall of 1972 and worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he helped develop Brown clustering, a statistical machine translation technique, as part of a speech recognition and translation research program led by Frederick Jelinek and Lalit Bahl. He also worked on IBM alignment models. In June 2014, Mercer received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award for this work. In 1993, Mercer joined hedge fund Renaissance Technologies after being recruited by executive Nick Patterson. The founder of Renaissance, James Harris Simons, a mathematician, preferred to hire mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists rather than business school students or financial analysts. Mercer and a former colleague from IBM, Peter Brown, became co-CEOs of Renaissance when Simons retired in 2009. Renaissance's main fund, Medallion, earned 39% per year on average from 1989 to 2006. In 2014, a bipartisan Senate panel estimated that Medallion investors underpaid their taxes by some $6.8 billion over more than a decade, by masking short-term gains as long-term returns. In 2014, Renaissance managed $25 billion in assets. In November 2017, Mercer announced that he would be stepping down from his position at Renaissance Technologies. The decision was taken after the hedge fund faced a backlash over Mercer's political activism. Mercer appears in the Paradise Papers as a director of eight Bermuda companies, some of which appear to have been used to legally avoid US taxes.
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