What Is Daniel Loeb's Net Worth?
Daniel Loeb is an American hedge fund manager, investor, and philanthropist who has a net worth of $3.3 billion. Daniel Loeb is the chief executive and founder of the New York hedge fund Third Point LLC. In late 2023, the company had a portfolio of $4 billion under management. His key to success is to buy troubled companies, get rid of poor management, and bring them back to profitability. Daniel has worked for Lafer Equity Investors, Jefferies LLC, and Citigroup, and he started Third Point Management in 1995, borrowing just over $3 million from family and friends. He established the Daniel S. Loeb Family/Third Point Foundation, which is dedicated to "encouraging individuals to develop a personalized approach to engaging in life-long philanthropy."
Early Life
Daniel Loeb was born Daniel Seth Loeb on December 18, 1961, in Santa Monica, California. He is the son of Clare and Ronald Loeb, and he has a brother named Josh. Clare is a historian, and Ronald was a partner at the Irell & Manella LLP law firm and served as general counsel for Williams-Sonoma. Daniel's great-aunt was Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel and created Barbie in the late '50s. His father was an outside director for the company for more than three decades and was interim President at one point.
Josh Loeb co-founded the Santa Monica-based Rustic Canyon restaurant group, which owns eight highly popular and successful restaurants in Southern California.
Daniel studied at Palisades Charter High School, where he took Advanced Placement classes and launched a skateboard company. One of his teachers gave him the nickname "Milo Minderbinder" after a character in "Catch-22" who was fascinated by the stock market. After graduation, Loeb spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley, before earning an economics degree from Columbia University in 1983. At Columbia, one of his classmates was future U.S. president Barack Obama. By the time Daniel was a senior at Columbia, he had made more than $100,000 in the stock market, but he lost it all after investing in the firm Puritan-Bennett Inc.
Career
Loeb worked at Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, from 1984 to 1987, then he was the director of corporate development at the record label Island Records, where his focus was securing debt financing. He later worked at Lafer Equity Investors as a risk arbitrage analyst and at Jefferies LLC as the distressed debt department's senior vice-president. From 1994 to 1995, Daniel was a vice-president at Citigroup. In 1995, he launched Third Point Management with the help of more than $3 million from his friends and family. The company's annualized returns between December 1996 and December 2015 were approximately +16.2%. In 2012, Third Point Management returned +21.2%, making it one of the year's best performing hedge funds. The following year, Loeb was featured on "Forbes" magazine's list of the "World's Richest Hedge Fund Managers & Traders." Through Third Point, Daniel held nearly 6% of Yahoo! stock, and in 2012, he sought seats on the company's board for himself as well as former executives Harry Wilson (Goldman Sachs), Jeff Zucker (NBC Universal), and Michael J. Wolf (MTV Networks). In May 2012, Loeb revealed that Scott Thompson, Yahoo!'s new CEO, didn't have a computer science degree, and the company announced soon after that Thompson was stepping down and nominated Loeb, Wolf, and Wilson to its board. The three men resigned from the board in July 2013, and the company agreed to buy back 40 million shares from Third Point at $1.6 billion.
Third Point also had shares in Sony, which it increased to 70 million shares (valued at $1.4 billion) in June 2013, and Loeb sold his shares in October 2014. Daniel invested $50 million in Ligand Pharmaceuticals after John Higgins became CEO in early 2007. This helped increase the biotech firm's profits to $250 million, and Loeb bought back more than $65 million in stock. In June 2017, it was revealed that Third Point owned around 40 million shares of Nestlé and was the company's sixth-largest shareholder. Daniel has also invested in Amazon and The Walt Disney Company, and in 2020, his Amazon shares were were worth $661 million and his Disney shares were worth $718 million.
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Personal Life
Daniel married Margaret Davidson Munzer at his East Hampton beach house on July 4, 2004, and they have welcomed three children together. Loeb co-founded the virtual stock trading contest Portfolios with Purpose, which raises funds for charitable organizations. In 2014, it was reported that Daniel was one of many "prominent investors [who] have taken to Transcendental Meditation." He served as co-chair of the Governors for Investors Industry and a Trustee of the Manhattan Institute, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Mount Sinai Health System, and U.S. Olympic Committee, and he has been a member of the National Council of the American Enterprise Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. Loeb was also on Sotheby's Board of Directors, and he chaired the Success Academy charter network's board. He has made donations to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Obama for America, Straight Talk America, Friends for Harry Reid, Volunteer PAC, Prosperity PAC, and Forward Together PAC. In 2013, he was a signatory to a brief that was submitted to the Supreme Court in the case Hollingsworth v. Perry, which re-legalized same-sex marriage in California. He had previously shown his support for making same-sex marriage legal in New York. Daniel helped fund the organization Freedom for All Americans, whose mission was to "protect LGBTQ Americans from discrimination nationwide."
Loeb has an extensive art collection, and at a 2009 Sotheby's auction, art dealer Larry Gagosian bought the Jeff Koons painting "Baroque Egg With Bow (Turquoise/Magenta)" from Daniel for $5.4 million, approximately $2.4 million more than Loeb paid for it. Daniel was at the top of "Business Insider's" 2011 list of "Wall Street's 25 Most Serious Art Collectors." Loeb has advocated for criminal justice reform, helping to fund the Brennan Center's Innocence Project as well as the Marshall Project, a "nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system." He pushed for the release of Louisiana inmate Bernard Noble, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the possession of two marijuana joints, and Noble was released seven years into his sentence. Daniel is also involved in education reform, and in 2013, he pledged $3 million to Success Academy Charter Schools. He endowed a scholarship at Columbia University, the Daniel S. Loeb Scholarship, and he co-founded Students First New York. Daniel has donated money to the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.
Real Estate
In early 2021, Loeb paid $20 million for a nearly 14,000 square foot mansion in Miami Beach. The seven-bedroom estate features a rooftop deck, home theater, and a boat dock. Shortly after buying the home, Daniel purchased a 4,910 square foot "waterfront teardown" nearby for $12 million. In December 2023, he put one of those homes on the market for $45 million. Loeb has also owned a $45 million Manhattan penthouse as well as a home in Aspen, Colorado, and a beach house in East Hampton, New York.
