In public, Ray Dalio has all the markings of an icon. He built his hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, into the largest in the world; he signed The Giving Pledge; he wrote a book about his principles (title: Principles) that sold millions of copies.
New York Times reporter Rob Copeland is here to shatter the illusion. On Tuesday, Copeland published a new biography, The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend, which draws on interviews with hundreds of people in Dalio’s orbit.
Copeland paints Dalio as an egomaniacal cult-of-personality leader with a penchant for cruelty. Under Dalio’s reign, he writes, sexual harassment was allegedly swept under the rug, employees were capriciously fired, and paranoia infected the workplace. Lots of people cried.
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No surprise, Dalio’s attorneys tried to impede the book’s publication. “Bridgewater and Dalio hired not one or two but three white-shoe law firms to send a pile of threatening letters to my publisher,” Copeland writes. “They threatened a lawsuit that would hold me and my publisher accountable for billions of dollars.”
In a statement posted to his LinkedIn page, Dalio said, “The book should be taken for what it is, which is another one of those sensational and inaccurate tabloid books written to sell books to people who like gossip.
“In brief,” he continued, “the author applied for a job at Bridgewater and was rejected. He then became an investigative reporter at a prominent newspaper and made a career of writing distorted stories about me and Bridgewater... In fact, the author states in the preface that the book is filled with made-up dialogue.”
Copeland acknowledged at the end of the book that he had applied twice for roles at Bridgewater. In the first instance, he was very early in his career and applied for numerous other jobs at the same time; in the second instance, around two years later, a recruiter reached out to him, but he withdrew from the application process partway through. Copeland also did not say that he had invented dialogue. Rather, he wrote: “In some instances, the dialogue in this book comes directly from the subject; in others, it is from others in the room, or people briefed afterward.”
Speaking to The Daily Beast, Copeland called Dalio’s effort to discredit him a weak attempt at distracting from “the facts of the book.”
“[Dalio] has been distorting reality in a major way for years upon years. And everyone around him, including his top deputies, know that. The people running Bridgewater now know that. I don't know if Ray knows it,” he said.
Copeland credits Dalio for his early success, and for posting years of positive returns at Bridgewater: “He identified what very few people at the time had identified, which was that it was more powerful to tell people you weren't going to lose their money than it was to tell them that you would make them money,” he said.
Nonetheless, he argued, Dalio has inaccurately positioned himself as an all-knowing thought leader with savant-like emotional intelligence. “The real life Ray Dalio... is almost absurdly different from the caricature that he's painted,” he said.
The Fund is a compelling read, with a surfeit of shocking anecdotes—so much so that Amazon Studios has already acquired the rights, according to the New York Post.
Below are some of the highlights:
Dalio had a gigantic ego
One of Bridgewater’s most famous peculiarities is a scoring system Dalio implemented to rate staffers’ adherence to his principles (the list now includes “embrace tough love” and “be radically transparent”). Years ago, Copeland reports, one of the staffers tasked with designing software to measure employees ran into an issue: two of Dalio’s underlings ranked higher than him in “believability.” The billionaire—who has “compared himself to the Dalai Lama” and Steve Jobs— reportedly came up with a solution: He had himself set as the new “baseline.”
“Dalio’s rating was now numerically bulletproof to negative feedback,” Copeland says.
Dalio’s ‘radical transparency’ knew no limits
As part of Bridgewater’s culture of transparency, employees were encouraged to rate each others’ performance, and they would file complaints on all sorts of trivial matters, from the toilet paper in the bathrooms, to the size of parking passes, to the quality of the peas in the cafeteria.
Many meetings were also recorded. In one anecdote from 2009, Dalio berated an employee for failing to quickly hire new recruits. “People in the room remember him screaming, waiting for her lip to quiver, then screaming at her again for failing to control her emotions,” Copeland writes.
Dalio allegedly had a sizzle reel made of her breakdown. He sent it to every person at the company and made prospective job candidates watch it, according to the book.
FBI Director James Comey on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC., on March 20, 2017.
Joshua Roberts/ReutersJames Comey was Dalio’s faithful lieutenant
Before he became director of the FBI—and went head to head with Donald Trump—Comey served as Bridgewater’s general counsel, with a $7 million salary, Copeland writes. For a time, Comey fit right in. He would investigate pressing issues—at least in Dalio’s mind—such as an extensive inquiry into a woman who complained that one of her coworkers didn’t bring bagels to the office “on the agreed-upon day.” Staffers accused of wrongdoing were put on trial internally.
Paranoia ran high. “Some employees took out the batteries on their company-issued cell phones when they were with family or friends,” Copeland reports.
In one case, Comey allegedly collaborated with a Bridgewater executive to entrap workers by leaving out a binder labeled in the executive’s name and seeing if anyone opened it. “Comey watched as a low-ranking Bridgewater employee stumbled upon the binder and began to peruse it,” Copeland writes. The executive and Comey “put the employee on trial, found him guilty, and fired him, with Dalio’s approval.” Comey declined to comment.
Dalio did not welcome scrutiny
Around 2017, Bridgewater was struggling to generate high returns, and some of Dalio’s subordinates believed they had discovered the culprit: their boss. They examined his trades and “investment ideas” and learned that he “was wrong as much as he was right, the book says.”
When the executives presented their findings, Copeland writes, they sat “nervously waiting for Dalio’s response.” The outcome? “Dalio picked up the piece of paper, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it.”
He wasn’t just difficult on the job
According to Copeland, Dalio brought his “radical transparency” home, as well. “On Christmas mornings, when the Dalio sons gave their father a gift, the Bridgewater founder would tell them immediately whether it was a good or bad choice,” Copeland writes. “If bad, Dalio would detail why it was off base.”
Some women allegedly were harassed at the firm
Copeland details several examples where women at Bridgewater were allegedly harassed, groped, or made uncomfortable. In some cases, he writes, Dalio knew about the accusations. He cites an incident from 2012, in which one of the billionaire’s top executives told a more junior employee to remove her shirt at a corporate retreat. Both of them were married.
Later, Copeland writes, the executive claimed the encounter was consensual. Comey was instructed to investigate. He asked the woman “a pointed question,” Copeland writes: “Did you feel you had a choice?” The women responded by saying she hadn’t been “physically forced,” but she also didn’t feel she could have said no. According to the book, “Comey presented his findings to Dalio, who moved to sweep the episode aside. Dalio announced to everyone at Bridgewater that he had investigated the party, and that there need be no further questions.”
