Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen
	Cohen in 2022.
Born	Steven A. Cohen; June 11, 1956 (age 70); Great Neck, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Citizenship	United States
Education	Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (BS, economics, 1978)
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Occupation	Hedge fund manager, sports team owner, art collector
Years active	1978–present
Employer	Point72 Asset Management
Company	Point72 Asset Management
Organization	S.A.C. Capital Advisors (1992–2016); Gruntal & Co. (1978–1992)
Title	Founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Point72 Asset Management; owner of the New York Mets
Known for	Building S.A.C. Capital and Point72; the largest insider trading settlement in United States history; ownership of the New York Mets
Net worth	US$21.3 billion (2024)
Spouse	Patricia Finke (m. 1979; div. 1990); Alexandra Garcia (m. 1992)
Children	7

Steven A. Cohen (born 11 June 1956) is an American hedge fund manager who founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors and Point72 Asset Management, and who has owned the New York Mets of Major League Baseball since 2020. Forbes estimated his net worth at US$21.3 billion in 2024, ranking him the thirtieth wealthiest person in the United States.

Cohen began trading options at the brokerage Gruntal & Co. in 1978, reportedly making a profit of US$8,000 on his first day, and by the mid-1980s was running his own group and a US$75 million portfolio. He founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors in 1992 with US$10 million of his own money and US$10 million from outside investors, and built it into one of the most profitable investment firms of its era, at its peak managing about US$14 billion and charging fees far above the industry standard on the strength of returns that few competitors approached.

The firm's methods drew regulatory attention for two decades. The Securities and Exchange Commission questioned Cohen in the late 1980s about trading ahead of the RCA–General Electric merger, and he declined to answer, invoking his right against self-incrimination; no charges followed. A much larger federal investigation from 2010 produced criminal charges against a series of S.A.C. employees, including the conviction of Mathew Martoma in what prosecutors described as the most profitable insider trading conspiracy in history. S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to wire and securities fraud in 2013 and paid US$1.8 billion — the largest insider trading penalty ever imposed — and was required to stop managing outside money.

Cohen was never criminally charged. He settled a civil administrative proceeding with the SEC in January 2016 for failing to supervise employees, an agreement that barred him from managing outside capital until 2018. He converted the business into the family office Point72 Asset Management in 2014, registered it as an investment adviser and reopened it to outside investors in 2018, and it has since grown to about US$45.7 billion under management, among the largest multi-strategy funds in the world alongside Citadel and Millennium. In 2025 he earned an estimated US$3.4 billion, topping Bloomberg's ranking of the highest-paid hedge fund managers for the first time and displacing Ken Griffin.

He bought the New York Mets from Fred Wilpon for US$2.4 billion in 2020, and has since operated the club with payrolls exceeding any in the sport's history. He is among the most substantial private collectors of contemporary art in the world.

Background: the hedge fund industry

Cohen's career spans the transformation of hedge funds from a marginal activity into one of the central institutions of American finance, and his firm was among the vehicles of that change.

Origins and structure

The hedge fund as a legal form is a private investment partnership open only to institutions and wealthy individuals, which permits it to operate outside most of the restrictions applying to mutual funds — it may short sell, use leverage, concentrate positions and charge performance fees.

The standard compensation arrangement, two percent of assets and twenty percent of profits, gives the manager an asymmetric payoff: a share of gains without a corresponding share of losses. The consequence is that the industry rewards volatility of returns as well as their level, and that the returns required to justify the fees are high.

The rise of the trading-oriented fund

The funds that grew fastest from the 1990s were not those making long-horizon investments but those trading actively on short-term information: earnings surprises, product announcements, clinical trial results, changes in industry conditions.

Such a fund's advantage lies in obtaining and interpreting information marginally before the market does. That places it, structurally, close to a legal boundary. Information about a company's prospects becomes material non-public information at a point that is defined by law but is often unclear in practice, and the difference between skilled research and unlawful trading can turn on where a fact originated and what duty the person who supplied it owed.

The research industry that grew around hedge funds — expert networks connecting investors to consultants who were often employees of the companies being analyzed — sat directly on that boundary, and it was the subject of the federal investigations of 2009 to 2014.

S.A.C.'s model

S.A.C. Capital operated a structure that concentrated these pressures. It ran a large number of small autonomous teams, each managing capital and trading its own book, competing internally for allocation and compensated on individual performance. Teams that performed were given more capital; teams that did not were dismissed.

The firm charged fees of up to three percent of assets and fifty percent of profits — far above the industry standard, and sustainable only because returns averaged roughly thirty percent a year over two decades.

Cohen sat at the centre, trading his own book from a position on the floor and taking positions on the ideas his managers supplied. Prosecutors later argued that this structure produced intense pressure to deliver information that others did not have, while insulating the man at the centre from knowledge of where it came from; Cohen's defenders argued that a firm cannot be held criminally responsible for the conduct of employees who deceived it.

Early life and education

Cohen was born on 11 June 1956 and raised in Great Neck, New York, the third of eight children. His father manufactured dresses in Manhattan's garment district; his mother taught piano. The family was Jewish.

He developed an interest in poker in high school, playing for his own money, and has credited the game with teaching him how to take risks. He graduated from John L. Miller Great Neck North High School in 1974, where he played soccer.

He studied economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1978, and joined the Theta chapter of Zeta Beta Tau, serving as its treasurer. While at Pennsylvania a friend helped him open a brokerage account with US$1,000 of his tuition money — his first market position.

He has said that he learned to read the tape by watching the stock quotations displayed in a brokerage window near campus, developing an intuition for price movement that he regarded as the foundation of his trading.

Career

Gruntal & Co., 1978–1992

Cohen joined the brokerage Gruntal & Co. in 1978 as a junior trader in the options arbitrage department, reportedly making US$8,000 on his first day. He came to generate around US$100,000 a day for the firm and by 1984 was running his own trading group with six traders and a portfolio of US$75 million.

The fourteen years at Gruntal established the method he applied for the rest of his career: rapid trading of equities and options over short horizons, sized aggressively, driven by information flow and by an intuition for how a stock was trading rather than by valuation.

The 1980s SEC inquiry

In the late 1980s the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated whether Cohen had traded on inside information in December 1985, when he positioned for a merger between RCA and General Electric ahead of its announcement.

Called to testify, Cohen declined to answer questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The Commission examined other trades from the same period. No charges were brought.

S.A.C. Capital Advisors, 1992–2016

Cohen founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors in 1992 with US$10 million of his own capital and US$10 million from outside investors; the name is drawn from his initials.

The firm grew rapidly on the strength of its returns, which averaged roughly thirty percent annually over long periods — figures that placed it among the most successful investment operations of the era. The New York Times described it in 2003 as one of the largest hedge funds and noted its reputation for frequent and rapid trading. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2006 that Cohen, previously a rapid-fire trader, was holding an increasing number of positions for longer periods. The same paper called him "the hedge fund king".

By 2009 the firm managed about US$14 billion in equity. Cohen's reported compensation was US$428 million in 2001 and about US$1 billion in 2005.

The insider trading investigation

The federal campaign

From around 2009 the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, under Preet Bharara, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the largest insider trading investigation in American history, using wiretaps, cooperating witnesses and the prosecution of expert-network consultants. It produced scores of convictions across the hedge fund industry.

S.A.C. Capital was a central target. Charges were brought against a series of current and former employees between 2010 and 2013, with varying outcomes, and prosecutors made clear that their objective was the firm's founder.

Martoma and Steinberg

The two cases that came closest to Cohen concerned Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg.

Martoma, a portfolio manager, was convicted in 2014 of trading in the pharmaceutical companies Elan and Wyeth ahead of the announcement of disappointing results from a clinical trial of an Alzheimer's drug, on information obtained from a physician involved in the trial. The positions, which S.A.C. reversed from long to short before the announcement, produced gains and avoided losses that prosecutors valued at about US$275 million — described by them as the most profitable insider trading conspiracy ever charged. Martoma was sentenced to nine years and did not cooperate against Cohen.

Steinberg, a senior employee and close confidant of Cohen, was convicted in 2013 of trading in Dell and Nvidia on information passed through a chain of analysts. His conviction was vacated in 2015 following the Second Circuit's decision in United States v. Newman, which tightened the requirement that a recipient of inside information must know that the source received a personal benefit for disclosing it, and the charges were dropped.

The corporate guilty plea

S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty in November 2013 to wire fraud and securities fraud. It paid US$1.8 billion in penalties and forfeiture — the largest insider trading penalty in United States history — and was required to cease managing money for outside investors.

The firm's affiliates had separately reached civil settlements with the SEC totalling nearly US$616 million, in which S.A.C. neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

Cohen's own position

Cohen was never criminally charged. Prosecutors did not obtain evidence sufficient to establish that he personally knew the source of the information on which the firm traded, and the cooperating witnesses did not implicate him directly.

The SEC brought a civil administrative proceeding alleging that he had failed to supervise Martoma and Steinberg. He settled it in January 2016 without admitting or denying the findings; the agreement barred him from managing outside capital until 1 January 2018 and required an independent consultant to review the firm's compliance.

The outcome — a firm convicted, employees imprisoned, and a founder who paid a supervisory penalty and returned to the industry — has been treated as the defining ambiguity of the entire prosecution campaign. It was examined at length in a January 2017 New Yorker article, "When the Feds Went After the Hedge-Fund Legend Steven A. Cohen".

The ex-wife's litigation

In December 2009 Cohen's former wife Patricia sued him and his brother Donald for racketeering and insider trading, alleging that he had concealed US$5.5 million during the negotiation of their 1989 separation agreement.

The United States District Court in Manhattan dismissed the case in March 2011. On 3 April 2013 the Second Circuit held that the lower court had erred in dismissing the fraud-based claims and revived them, together with claims of racketeering and breach of fiduciary duty, while upholding the dismissal of an unjust enrichment claim. Circuit Judge Pierre N. Leval, writing for the panel, held that Patricia Cohen had made a plausible allegation of concealment.

The revival coincided with the arrest of Michael Steinberg and added to the pressure on Cohen during the investigation's most intense phase.

Point72 Asset Management

Family office

Cohen converted the business into Point72 Asset Management in 2014, operating it as a family office managing his own capital — a structure that fell outside much of the regulation applying to funds with external investors, and that complied with the requirement that S.A.C. stop managing outside money.

The firm retained a substantial part of the S.A.C. investment staff and its multi-manager structure, and continued to produce strong returns through the period in which it managed only Cohen's money.

Return to outside capital

Point72 registered as an investment adviser and reopened to external investors in 2018, on the expiry of the SEC bar. Institutional investors that had avoided S.A.C. subscribed, and the firm grew rapidly.

As of 2026 it manages about US$45.7 billion, placing it among the largest multi-strategy hedge funds in the world alongside Citadel and Millennium Management. Its flagship fund returned approximately 17.5 percent in 2025, a fourth consecutive year of double-digit gains.

Cohen earned an estimated US$1.7 billion in 2020 and an estimated US$3.4 billion in 2025, the latter placing him at the top of Bloomberg's ranking of the world's highest-paid hedge fund managers for the first time, ahead of Ken Griffin.

Point72 Academy and structure

Point72 developed an internal training programme, the Point72 Academy, recruiting graduates without financial experience and training them as analysts — a response both to the difficulty of recruiting experienced staff after 2013 and to a judgment that analysts formed inside the firm's compliance culture were preferable to those formed elsewhere.

The firm also built substantial systematic and macro businesses alongside its fundamental equity operation, and in October 2024 launched Turion, a fund dedicated to artificial intelligence investments run by the portfolio manager Eric Sanchez, in which Cohen is himself an investor. The fund gained 14 percent within months of launch and was expected to reach US$1.5 billion in assets.

GameStop

In January 2021, during the short squeeze in GameStop shares driven by retail investors coordinating on social media, Point72 joined Ken Griffin's Citadel in providing US$2.75 billion to Melvin Capital, the fund run by Cohen's former employee Gabe Plotkin, which had been heavily short the stock.

The intervention made Cohen a target of the online campaign. He deactivated his Twitter account on 29 January 2021 after threats against him and his family, and denied that the losses would affect his willingness to spend on the New York Mets.

Melvin Capital did not recover and closed in 2022.

New York Mets

Cohen agreed in 2020 to buy the New York Mets from Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz for approximately US$2.4 billion, then the largest price paid for a Major League Baseball franchise. He had previously held a minority stake, and an earlier attempt to buy control had failed.

The purchase required approval by three-quarters of the other club owners, which was granted notwithstanding the 2013 guilty plea — a decision that drew comment given the sport's historic sensitivity to the integrity of its owners.

Cohen has operated the club at payroll levels exceeding any in the sport's history, incurring luxury tax charges that no previous owner had accepted, and the highest tier of that tax has been referred to informally as the Cohen tax. He signed Francisco Lindor and, in December 2024, Juan Soto to a contract reported at US$765 million over fifteen years, then the largest in professional sports.

He has been unusually accessible to supporters, using social media directly until the 2021 episode and afterwards, and has invested in the club's facilities and analytics operations. He has also pursued the development of a casino and entertainment complex on the parking areas adjoining Citi Field, a project requiring state legislative approval.

Art collection

Cohen is among the largest private collectors of modern and contemporary art in the world. His collection has included works by Picasso, Warhol, de Kooning, Giacometti, Munch, Manet, Jasper Johns and Jeff Koons.

He bought Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, for a reported US$8 million in 2004, and subsequently paid for the deteriorated specimen to be replaced. He acquired Picasso's Le Rêve from Steve Wynn for a reported US$155 million in 2013, after an earlier agreed sale collapsed when Wynn accidentally put his elbow through the canvas. He bought Giacometti's L'Homme au doigt for US$141.3 million in 2015.

He has lent extensively to museums and serves as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art.

Philanthropy

Cohen and his wife Alexandra established the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, which has given to healthcare, education, veterans' services and the arts.

Its largest commitments have been to veterans' mental health, through the Cohen Veterans Network, a system of clinics providing mental health care to post-9/11 veterans and their families, and to Cohen Veterans Bioscience, which funds research into post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. The commitment followed the experience of Cohen's son, a Marine who served in Afghanistan.

The foundation has also given to paediatric healthcare, including the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York, and to Lyme disease research.

Personal life

Cohen married Patricia Finke in 1979; they had two children and divorced in 1990. He married Alexandra Garcia in 1992; they have children of their own and Cohen has seven children in total.

He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a substantial estate, and has owned residences in Manhattan and East Hampton. His penthouse in the Bloomberg Tower was listed in December 2013 at US$115 million.

In popular culture

Cohen is widely regarded as a principal model for Bobby Axelrod, the hedge fund manager played by Damian Lewis in the Showtime series Billions, which centres on a federal prosecutor's pursuit of a trader he cannot convict. The series' creators have acknowledged drawing on the S.A.C. investigation among other sources.

The investigation is the subject of Sheelah Kolhatkar's Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street (2017), the principal book-length account.

Assessment

Cohen's record admits two readings that are difficult to reconcile and that have both been argued at length.

The first holds that he is among the most capable traders of his generation. Returns of roughly thirty percent a year sustained over two decades, achieved while charging the highest fees in the industry, cannot be explained by fee structure or leverage alone, and Point72's performance since 2018 — under compliance supervision, with a rebuilt staff, and in a far more competitive market — is evidence that the capability was real and was his.

The second holds that the returns and the conduct cannot be separated. A firm whose employees were convicted of insider trading, which pleaded guilty to securities and wire fraud, and which paid the largest penalty of its kind, generated part of its record from information it was not entitled to have; and the structure that produced it — autonomous teams under intense pressure, reporting ideas to a principal who did not ask where they came from — was designed by the person who profited most from it.

The legal outcome is what makes the question durable. Prosecutors pursued Cohen for years with the resources of the largest insider trading investigation in American history and did not charge him, which is either evidence that he did not commit the offence or evidence of the difficulty of proving knowledge in a firm organized as his was. The SEC's supervisory settlement, which required no admission, resolved the matter without answering it.

References

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