Robert Mercer

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Robert Leroy “Bob” Mercer (born July 11, 1946 in San José , California ) is an American computer scientist who rose to become a multi-billionaire as a successful hedge fund manager. He was one of Donald Trump's key supporters in the 2016 presidential election .

education

Mercer grew up in New Mexico . His father was a biologist . After graduating from high school , he took part in the National Youth Science Camp as a representative of New Mexico , where he learned the programming language Fortran . In 1968 he earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque . While studying, he worked as a programmer for the United States Air Force . He then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana to study computer science, and graduated in 1972 with a Ph.D. from.

Professional career

After graduation, Mercer worked for IBM for 20 years, developing programs for speech recognition and statistical machine translation. In this area he was one of the pioneers in the application of statistical and probabilistic methods in computational linguistics , on which today's speech recognition and translation programs such as Google Translate and Siri are based. The new approach, which is now regarded as “revolutionary”, consisted in letting the programs no longer work through linguistic rules, but having them analyze bilingual files on a large scale in order to discover patterns in them and to derive from these assessments for likely correct translations. Since the company's management did not provide the necessary funds because they saw no potential for the future in it, he and his project partner Peter Brown took additional funds from the Pentagon agency DARPA in order to be able to continue their research.

1993 Mercer and Brown were from the high-frequency trading specialized investment company Renaissance Technologies recruited to analysis and prediction programs to develop for global trade. Mercer initially ignored this offer as he had never heard of the company. After both of his parents died in quick succession and Renaissance continued to woo him, he finally decided on this better-paying job. Over the course of a few years, he and Brown developed increasingly sophisticated programs that made the company's Medallion Fund one of the most profitable hedge funds in the world. Since this fund is only accessible to the company's 300 or so employees, they have "perhaps the largest money printing machine in the world," as Bloomberg News once wrote. In 2010, Mercer and Brown became the two CEOs of Renaissance . Mercer's income at Renaissance was estimated at $ 135 million in 2015. In November 2017, he announced that he would be stepping down from the company's management at the end of the year.

In 2014, Mercer was recognized by the Association for Computational Linguistics for his lifetime achievement.

Political activities

Mercer is considered to be one of the ten US billionaires with the greatest political influence. In 2016 alone, he spent 25 million US dollars on this. Much of it went to Republican -sponsoring Super PACs , and he's the main donor of Make America Number 1 Super PAC , which has his daughter Rebekah on the board and who hired Stephen Bannon to lead Trump's presidential campaign. Bannon was considered the most important political advisor to the Mercers. Mercer also gave millions of dollars to the Heritage Foundation , Bannon-led Breitbart News Network ($ 10 million) and the Cambridge Analytica (about $ 5 million), the libertarian Cato Institute , the arch-conservative media research Center ($ 11 million) and others. Mercer has also used its IT companies and their big data knowledge to exert political influence.

Super PACs are entities that use large sums of money to influence politics. This is possible to an unlimited extent in the USA, since 2010 the previous restrictions were lifted ( Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ). Robert and Rebekah Mercer were among the first to take advantage of these new opportunities. In New York, Mercer spent a million dollars on an advertising campaign against a fictitious plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero . With this campaign, condemned as anti-Islamic, he wanted to support the candidate of the Conservative Party of New York State in the fight for governorship. Also in 2010, the Mercers sponsored an advertising campaign against the re-election of Peter DeFazio , a Democratic MP from Oregon to the US House of Representatives with $ 600,000 . The Republican candidate in the same constituency was Arthur B. Robinson , a climate change denier , of which they are a supporter and a supporter.

After these first campaigns did not bring the desired success, the Mercers turned to entrepreneurs Charles and David Koch ( Koch Industries ), who had been lobbying for decades and for like-minded people who wanted to use their wealth to promote right-wing politics , also offered seminars. In the years that followed, the Mercers transferred over $ 25 million to the Kochs Fund, which was active in elections across Germany.

In 2011 they met Andrew Breitbart , the founder of Breitbart News , who conveyed his vision to build a media company that would wage an information war against the mainstream press and give the "silenced majority" a voice would. He introduced her to Bannon, and at his suggestion, they invested $ 10 million in the then unimportant Breitbart News . In this context, Bannon was inducted into the company's board of directors and took over the helm following Breitbart's unexpected death in 2012.

Mercer contributed $ 15 million to found Cambridge Analytica to create a tool to effectively influence politics in the United States. His daughter Rebekah and Bannon were accepted into the company's boardroom.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Mercer initially supported Republican Ted Cruz . After he was eliminated in the primaries, he instead relied on Donald Trump, who was still considered hopeless at the time. With him he could not only prevent Hillary Clinton as president, but at the same time try to disempower the entire political establishment. In contrast to other wealthy supporters, who sometimes invested even larger sums in other candidates, he did not limit himself to short-term advertising campaigns, but used Breitbart News and other organizations to influence the general political mood. Many observers and commentators saw this as the main reason for Trump's surprising election victory.

Mercer has never spoken publicly about his own political views. According to statements from people from his earlier environment, he has believed a conspiracy-theoretical story since the 1990s , according to which Bill and Hillary Clinton were active in drug smuggling with the CIA and were responsible for several murders. Mercer called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , which formally and enforceably ended racial segregation in the United States, a "big mistake," and he was very much in favor of Trump's appointment of Jeff Sessions, known for racist remarks, as US Attorney General . With regard to the state, he takes libertarian views with the aim of reducing it to a minimum ( minarchism ).

A long-time senior Renaissance employee, David Magerman, made several public statements about Mercer's political views and actions after the latter warned him in February 2017 for making critical statements within the company. In a comment in the Philadelphia Inquirer , Magerman wrote that Mercer had something of a stake in Trump's presidency because of his influence. He told journalist Jane Mayer ( The New Yorker ) that Mercer's view that a person's worth is measured solely by their income and that recipients of social benefits have a negative value. From Mercer's point of view, society is on its head when it helps the weak and weakens the strong by raising taxes. At the end of April 2017, Magerman was laid off after 20 years with the company.

In November 2017, Mercer wrote in a statement to Renaissance staff that there was a lot of misinformation about his views, and in particular distanced himself from racism ( white supremacy ) and other forms of discrimination . Shortly thereafter, it was announced through the Paradise Papers that Mercer had eight mailbox companies in Bermuda through which he avoided taxes on a large scale.

Mercer Family Foundation

Like many other wealthy families, the Mercers run their own foundation . When it was established in 2004, the Mercer Family Foundation was funded with half a million dollars and primarily supported medical research and charities. When Rebekah Mercer took over the helm in 2008, the foundation began donating millions to a network of ultra-conservative non-profit organizations , some of which, like Citizens United , were instrumental in spreading attacks on Hillary Clinton .

The Foundation is also one of the largest donors to the organized climate denial movement , specifically the Heartland Institute , which received around $ 5.9 million from the Mercer Foundation between 2008 and 2016. In 2016 alone, she donated more than $ 2 million to various climate denial organizations.

The Foundation has no office space, no employees and no website. She was temporarily registered in Rebekah Mercer's private apartment in Manhattan . Today (2017) her address is a mailbox in a nearby United Parcel Service branch .

In 2013, the foundation awarded a total of $ 13.5 million. It also had revenues of $ 11 million, 89% of which was contributions from founders Robert and Diana Mercer. With comparable foundations in the USA, however, an average of 80% of the income comes from external donors.

Private

During his time at IBM, Mercer lived with his wife Diana and three daughters in Westchester County, near the IBM research center there . The eldest daughter, Jennifer or Jenji, studied law at Georgetown University but then turned to horses and riding with her mother. In 2008 they bought a horse farm in Florida for $ 5.9 million. Diana Mercer also owns an equestrian facility there that aims to train non-verbal leadership and communication based on horse- inspired wisdom . The second daughter, Rebekah, first studied biology and mathematics, but later earned her master's degree in operations research . The youngest daughter, Heather Sue, played at high school and at the Duke University in the Football team. When she felt disadvantaged at the university by the coach compared to male players, she sued the university and received compensation of $ 2 million.

Today Robert and Diana Mercer live in seclusion in their sprawling Owl's Nest estate in Head of the Harbor on Long Island , near the Renaissance headquarters. He rarely appears in public and is considered extremely taciturn: “I'm happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody.” ( "I'm happy to go through my life without saying anything to anybody.") Mercer is a member of the weapons - lobbyists Association National Rifle Association (NRA) and was a shooting build in the cellar. He collects machine guns and also owns a gun that Arnold Schwarzenegger wore in the movie Terminator . In the basement of his estate, he also was for 2.7 million US dollars a H0 - Model Railway install that the state of New York reproduces faithfully. Six years later he sued the executing company because he estimated the value of the plant at only about $ 700,000.

Rebekah Mercer operates the Mercer Family Foundation and represented in Donald Trumps Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee (as "executive committee of the presidential transition team ") the interests of the family.

Fonts

  • With Frederick Jelinek and Lalit R. Bahl: Design of a linguistic statistical decoder for the recognition of continuous speech . In: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 21 , pp. 250-256 (1975). ( Abstract )
  • With Frederick Jelinek and Lalit R. Bahl: A Maximum Likelihood Approach to Continuous Speech Recognition . In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence 5 , pp. 179-190 (1983). ( Abstract )
  • With Paul S. Cohen: A Method for Efficient Storage and Rapid Application of Context-Sensitive Phonological Rules for Automatic Speech Recognition . In: IBM Journal of Research and Development 31 , pp. 81-90 (1987). ( Abstract )
  • With Eric Mays and Fred J. Damerau: Context based spelling correction . In: Information Processing & Management 27 , pp. 517-522 (1991). ( Abstract )
  • With Kenneth Ward Church: Introduction to the Special Issue on Computational Linguistics Using Large Corpora . In: Computational Linguistics 19 , pp. 1-24 (1993).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Jane Mayer: The reclusive hedge-fund tycoon behind the Trump presidency . The New Yorker , March 27, 2017.
  2. ↑ Lawrence Delevigne: Have Mercer! The money man who helped the GOP win . CNBC, Nov. 8, 2014.
  3. ^ A b Alana Abramson, Lucinda Shen: Conservative Megadonor Robert Mercer Is Stepping Down As CEO of His Massive Hedge Fund. Read His Full Statement . Fortune, November 2, 2017.
  4. ↑ Amber Phillips: The 10 most influential billionaires in politics , The Washington Post , September 21, 2015
  5. ^ OpenSecrets.org: Top Individual Contributors. , accessed July 1, 2017.
  6. ^ A b c Gregory Zuckerman, Keach Hagey, Scott Patterson, Rebecca Ballhaus: Meet the Mercers: A Quiet Tycoon and His Daughter Become Power Brokers in Trump's Washington. In: Wall Street Journal , Jan. 8, 2017.
  7. ^ Keep the Promise I / Make America Number 1 Contributors, 2016 cycle . In: OpenSecrets . November 18, 2016. Retrieved November 18, 2016.
  8. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy
  9. ↑ German translation: http://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=38321
  10. ^ Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, Carole Cadwalladr: How Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions. . The New York Times , March 17, 2018.
  11. ↑ Erik Larson: Mercer Sued by Hedge Fund Worker Fired After Blasting Trump . Bloomberg Politics, May 8, 2017.
  12. ^ A b Jon Swaine: Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon's attacks on Hillary Clinton . In: The Guardian , November 7, 2017.
  13. ^ The Mercers, Trump's Billionaire Megadonors, Ramp Up Climate Change Denial Funding . In: Huffington Post , January 25, 2018. Retrieved January 26, 2018.
  14. ^ Museum of Natural History urged to cut ties with 'anti-science propagandist' Rebekah Mercer . In: The Guardian , January 26, 2018. Retrieved January 26, 2018.
  15. ↑ NonProfitFacts.com: Mercer Family Foundation in New York, New York (NY)
  16. ↑ Heike Buchter: in the grip of the owl. ZEIT ONLINE, March 4, 2017.
  17. ↑ http://www.fuw.ch/article/der-heimliche-financier-der-trump-rebellion/
  18. ↑ Thomas Jahn: Trump's donor withdraws . Handelsblatt, November 2, 2017.
  19. ↑ John Marzulli: Hedge fund hotshot Robert Mercer files lawsuit over $ 2M model train, accusing builder of overcharge . Daily News, March 31, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Mercer, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mercer, Robert Leroy; Mercer, Robert L .; Mercer, Bob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist and hedge fund manager
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH San Jose , California