American Billionaire Jim Simons Dies at 86, Leaving $31.4 Billion Net Worth

Jakarta –

Billionaire investor from the United States (USA) Jim Simons died at the age of 86 in New York, USA, last Friday (10/5). This sad news comes from his foundation, the Simons Foundation.

Reporting from CNN International, Monday (13/5/2024) the foundation did not reveal the cause of death. Simons left a net worth of US$ 31.4 billion or IDR 502 trillion (exchange rate IDR 16,000). Throughout his life, he brought about US$ 6 billion or Rp.

Simons is the founder of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and pioneered quantitative investing. These investments are market strategies that rely on mathematical and statistical models to identify investment opportunities. Later in life, Simons became a political donor and philanthropist.

Simons loved math and numbers from an early age. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1938, Simons earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

“Matthew was the only subject I liked,” Simons said in a 2015 podcast interview.

After teaching briefly at MIT and Harvard University, Simons joined the Institute for Defense Analysis in Princeton, New Jersey, working as a code breaker for the National Security Agency.

According to his foundation, Simons was expelled from the institute in 1968 for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Simons then joined the faculty at Stony Brook University as head of the school’s mathematics department.

Simons left academia in the late 70s and eventually founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982.

“By looking at price patterns, I can see that there is something we can learn here and that there are ways to predict prices mathematically and statistically,” Simons said on the Numberphile podcast.

“Gradually, we created models. They got better and better. In the end, models replaced the foundations,” he said.

His computer models helped grow hedge funds into a billion dollar industry. Later in life, Simons devoted his time to philanthropy and became a major political contributor to the Democratic Party.

The Simons Foundation donates to autism research and provides grants for education and research in science and mathematics. Last year, the Simons foundation gave US$ 500 million or about Rp. 8 trillion (Rp. 16,000 exchange rate) to the Stony Brook endowment fund.

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