. John Arnold, Centaurus Energy - $1.5 billion. Musicians from the New York Philharmonic geek out about their favorite John Williams scores. In 2012, after growing his firm, Centaurus Advisors, from an initial $8 million to $5 billion in less than a decade, he announced that he was walking away to pursue other interests. Follow the topics you want and receive the daily emails. In 2015, after a cancer researcher was found to have falsified research data and defrauded the government out of millions of dollars, Arnold complained on Twitter that the penalty, a five-year funding restriction, was too light. John Arnold on Oil and Gas Startups - Digital Wildcatters Nonprofits are very good at reporting their success rates and citing the science behind their interventions, but dig into their claimsas the Arnolds would try to doand you find that they often omit relevant context or confuse correlation with causation. The Arnolds identify as Democrats and were major financial supporters of President Barack Obama. [49], Arnold is married to Laura Elena (Muoz) Arnold. That's the true story of former star Enron trader John Arnold, who most recently worked as a hedge fund manager. Get access to 100,000+ more news articles & industry data. Inside the Secretive Life-Extension Clinic. Centaurus Capital LP has committed around $500 million in equity for EOC Partners, according to the . John Arnold President Houston, Texas, United States 12 followers Join to view profile Centaurus Capital Experience President - President Centaurus Capital View John's full profile See who. The picture Taubes painted wasnt of a flawed study here or there but of a fundamentally broken scientific culture. We are Centaurus. I would buy up all the premium hockey cards and send them to Canada or upstate New York. He called the company Blue Chip Cards. Centaurus, which started in 2002 with just a handful of traders and now has 70 employees, focuses on this virtual kind of trading. (After an external and internal review, The BMJ published a correction but chose not to retract the investigation. [42], Arnolds foundation, Arnold Ventures, created a Public Safety Assessment which gave recently arrested individuals a score to determine their flight risk and potential bail. As a general rule, the incentives related to quantitative research are very different in the social sciences and in financial practice, says James Owen Weatherall, author of The Physics of Wall Street. Those were the early days of the internet, and he managed to gain access to an online bulletin board intended only for card dealers. John Arnold is Founder and Co-Chair of Arnold Ventures. Philanthropy Is for the Living. John Arnold, "ph thy" ca gii u c nng lng In recent years Arnold has invested in solar farms and deepwater oil developments in the Gulf of Mexico. [22], Arnold started donating to the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in 2004 with a gift of $30,000 which was then based in Houston, and two years later he and his wife pledged $10 million to help KIPP expand to other cities. "[36], In 2019, Arnold spoke out against donor-advised funds (DAF), criticizing them for delaying charitable giving and promoting giving to institutions that are less likely to need the money. In a sense, thats the strongest weapon that we have. In some cases, they may even have more favorable tax deductions when donating appreciable securities to a 501(c)(3) public charity. All rights reserved. 123. But as a practical matter, we grew to be so large in terms of our appetite for change in our policy areas that it just became cumbersome to have a C3 group on one side and a C4 group on the other side and having them not really be able to talk to each other. Nosek says that the cash offers were Arnolds idea. People would read into it, and they would say hes just being cagey, DAgostino says. A new study shows are the four most dangerous words, Arnold wrote on Twitter. One of the counterparties Amaranth approached was Centaurus. Enron billionaire frets about public pensions' solvency The more you read the research, the less you know, Arnold says. Not long after the podcast went online, he received a five-line email from Arnold. People who did, didnt know how to clean it up and analyze it as well as we did.. Luce's career in natural-gas storage includes leading roles with energy and utility company Sempra Energy and with NGS Energy, a developer backed by billionaire energy trader John Arnold's Centaurus Advisors hedge fund. Private, non-publicly traded companies are not obligated to do any of those things. He holds a B.A. His father, who died when Arnold was 18, was a lawyer. Fortune magazine has called him one of the least-known billionaires in the country. Like Nosek, Taubes had to Google Arnold to learn who he was. Media reports have declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. Text. John Arnold got his start as a natural gas trader at Enron. Billionaires John and Laura Arnold Billionaire Pledges to Give Away 5% 2020)", "A divided federal appeals court rules Baltimore's surveillance plane is constitutional, cites city's struggles", "Billionaire-Funded Criminal Justice Reform Actually Expands Carceral System", "Officials Got a Windfall Before Enron's Collapse", "How a billionaire couple greased the skids for Nancy Pelosi's drug pricing bill", "Storied Texas Mansion Completely Demolished: The Bulldozer Brings Down Houston's Greatest Architect", "Big and Modern on Lazy Lane: John Arnold Tries House Trading | Swamplot", Baylor College of Medicine: "Laura Arnold named to BCM Board of Trustees" by Lori Williams, "Meet Laura Arnold, the billionaire philanthropist taking on the parole system with Jay-Z and Meek Mill", "Our Team | Laura and John Arnold Foundation", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_D._Arnold&oldid=1150152010, This page was last edited on 16 April 2023, at 16:09. In finance, meanwhile, at least when one is trading with ones own money, there are strong incentives to work to that stronger standard. These wealthy Houstonians were named to Forbes' list of the - KPRC From Hedge Fund Billionaire to Mega-Donor. Now, with multiple grants from the Arnolds, he is leading an effort to build an open, searchable database that will link all publicly available information on every clinical trial in the world. In its first seven years, according to Fortune, the fund never returned less than 50 percent. Our Team | Arnold Ventures Former Enron Corp. energy trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus Energy Master Hedge Fund. John Arnold's Greatest Trade: Blowing Off Brian Hunter His ~$3 billion fund, Centaurus, was down 4% in 2010 YTD, according. InfluenceWatch Podcast #267: Weingarten Will Not Be Apologizing. Plus, systems of prestige and advancement die hard. John Douglas Arnold (born 1974) is an American philanthropist, former Enron executive, and founder of Arnold Ventures LLC, formerly the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. But compared with the benefit of near-total anonymity, wealthy elites like the Arnolds are forgoing the tax advantages of a foundation or traditional nonprofit to further withdraw from public scrutiny. Unlike Tom Steyer, a billionaire who earned his wealth investing in oil and natural gas and now hypocritically blames those commodities for devastating the planet, John Arnold says little about climate change. The Reproducibility Project, meanwhile, swelled to include more than 270 researchers working to reproduce 100 psychology experimentsand in August 2015, Nosek revealed its results. Arnold began his career as a trader for Enron: He would . After initially working on the Crude Oil desk, John moved over to the Natural Gas Desk upon the departure of Jeff . 171 on Forbes list. [26] In 2008, the Arnolds were original signatories of the Giving Pledge,[27] a pledge by some high-net-worth individuals to donate the majority of their income to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes. All rights reserved. [38], In 2020, Arnold was one of ten billionaires who had given away at least 20% of their wealth. Laura and John Arnold, co-founders and co-chairs of Arnold Ventures. He questioned everything, Fleisher says. Media reports declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. [18][19], In 2009, Arnold gave a public speech to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), in which he opposed limits on financially settled trading positions but supported limits in the physical energy futures as they near expiration. Arnold, head of $3 billion Houston-based Centaurus Energy, has generated gains approaching 200% so far this year, according to a person familiar with the former Enron trader and his fund. Guest: John Arnold is an American philanthropist and founder of Arnold Ventures. Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold committed Monday, April 5, 2021, to donate 5% of their wealth annually as part of an effort to . The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. During the podcast, he mentioned that he was raising money in the hope of funding experiments that might deepen our understanding of the root causes of obesity. Far from arbitrary, this body of regulationwhich Schambra is certainly right to call annoyingcodifies a common understanding between Americans and their government: Philanthropy is crucial for a healthy civil society. But Shankman recognized that he and Arnold were different in one key respect: Arnold had a greater appetite for risk, a quality that seemed at odds with his quiet demeanor. And good traders, as Arnold sees it, naturally come to appreciate something that researchers too often miss: Its very easy to be fooled by your own data. The development of regulation around the philanthropic sector throughout the 20th century may have formed the modern nonprofit organization, but it only codified what had been thriving in America since before the American Revolution. After that Arnold started his own hedge fund, Centaurus Energy, where he became, in the words of one hedge fund competitor, "the best trader that ever lived, full stop." . ), The backlash against Teicholz also furnished one of the few occasions when anyone has raised an eyebrow at the Arnolds funding of science critics. Laura and John established the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in 2010 with a straightforward mission: to improve lives through evidence-based solutions. . The NAACP and ACLU have criticized the Arnold PSA because they believe risk assessment tools actually increased the number of prisoners under the guise of criminal justice reform. By law, natural gas pipelines had to make much of their information public, and around the time Centaurus was forming, more of that information began to appear online. Laura tells me she sees her husbands appetite for riskan appetite she says she sharesas the most obvious link between his approach to trading and philanthropy. The problem, they claim, isnt that scientists dont want to do the right thing. Now she's turning her attention to storing green hydrogen, which is hydrogen produced using clean power. Centaurus alum reunite under Whalley to launch new fund Six months later the Arnold Foundation made a $4.7 million seed grant to the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), the nonprofit Taubes cofounded to support fundamental research on diet and health. John Arnold's tweet, "A new study shows " are "the four most dangerous words," is a perfect crystallization of the philanthropist's skeptical attitude toward a lot of scientific research. But powerful special interests are trying to question science., If John Arnold decided he wanted to beat hunger, I wouldnt want to bet on hunger.. A lot of people didnt know it was out there, Arnold says. The National Institutes of Health is moving forward with new requirements for data sharing; starting as early as this year, all NIH-funded training programs must include plans for teaching researchers the principles of reproducibility. He and a graduate student were developing an online system that would allow researchers to keep a public log of the experiments they were running, where they could register their hypotheses, methods, workflows, and data as they worked. Like Tom Steyer, George Soros, and a number of other mega-donors on the Left, John Arnold earned his vast wealth as a hedge fund investor. [3][4][5][6][7], In 2019, Arnold became the chairman of Houston's 2026 bid for the FIFA World Cup. ISSN 2577-9877 Written. He announced that he was closing Centaurus in a letter to investors: After 17 years as an energy trader, I feel that it is time to pursue other interests., Arnold tells me that he had lost some of his passion for trading. About - Centaurus Financial, Inc.. And though the fund bounced back the next year, tighter regulations on trading and a far less volatile marketthanks to a growing supply of natural gas from shale rockmade it unlikely that Arnold would again see the astonishing returns of only a few years earlier. Brian Nosek had pretty much given up on finding a funder. [17] August 2008, Centaurus acquired around 10% of the shares of National Coal Corporation (NCOC). John The problem even had a name: the file drawer effect. The tech giant is helping researchers and clinicians decipher vast amounts of data generated by people with persistent symptoms. The Incomparable John Arnold, From the King of Natural Gas to Agent of The foundation aims to foster a culture in which individuals have the best chance to succeed and prosper, while encouraging a sense of responsibility, compassion and reinvestment toward their communities and society as a whole. A 2017 interview with Wired magazine characterized him this way: Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researchers work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. Is Centaurus's John Arnold Losing His Touch? - Institutional Investor Mr. Arnold is also Founder of Centaurus Capital LP, a family office investment fund with a specific focus on the energy industry. "[13][14] When Enron collapsed, he was not accused of any wrongdoing. Theres no fake it until you make it with General John Shaw, the Guardians who serve with him sleep better knowing hes at the helm. In 2002, he founded Centaurus Advisors with $8 millionhis last Enron bonus, paid out just days before the company filed for bankruptcyin Houston, Texas, to invest in futures, options, and derivatives for coal, natural gas, and crude oil. That focus led Rolling Stone to call Arnold a young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generations Koch brothers. (In 2015, Bloomberg suggested that Arnold may have somehow managed to become less popular as a philanthropist than he was as a billionaire trader. Flagship Were not looking to create an organization of safe success, she says. Arnold's summary of his big-hearted plans reads as could only be written by a trader, particularly points 2 and 3: . Arnold's hedge fund thrives as Amaranth falls - MarketWatch The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. [20][21] Arnold announced his retirement from running the hedge fund on May 2, 2012. Will And for two years they had been rejected again and againwhich was, by 2011, discouraging but not all that surprising to the 38-year-old scientist. [50] She was formerly a mergers-and acquisitions attorney in Houston, Texas, and an oil company executive. When Mr. Arnold, 31, created Centaurus in 2002 with $8 million of his own money, the energy trading industry was on its knees, incapacitated by the fraud and irrational exuberance at Enron.. As far as big dollar donors go, John Arnold and his wife, Laura, are not well known to conservatives. Centaurus Advisors Awards & Accolades. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Centaurus Advisors employees and get real answers from people on the inside. Arnold, 46, was raised in a middle-class family and worked her way through Harvard, she wrote in a July 2010 letter announcing her decision to sign The Giving Pledge. THE ARNOLDS had been dabbling in philanthropy for years, supporting a few handpicked programs in education, criminal justice reform, and other areas that were important to them. To which the answer is clearly no, but theres a lot of bullshit masquerading as science. (Some of the background footage in the segment came from the Arnold Foundation.). He was an entrepreneurial kid, earning some $50,000 before leaving high school by marketing collectible sports cards in the internets early years. Washington DC | New York | Houston | Pittsburgh | Mexico City Calgary | Chile. A new edition of the record evokes the feeling of the remarkable 18th-century studio in which it was recorded. Corp All Rights Reserved. At the Center for Open Science, Nosek has already begun to experiment with new incentives for scientists. On the contrary, Arnold says he believes that most researchers go into their work with the best of intentions, only to be led astray by a system that rewards the wrong behaviors. John Arnold, a highly successful energy trader at 38 years old, earned $750 million after Enron, the company he worked for had . Stem Cell Junk Yards Reveal a New Clue About Aging. Former NGI Archives Copyright2023Capital Research Center. A 2016 study to determine the effectiveness of the badges showed that the number of articles that reported publicly available data had increased tenfold. Ultimately his army of volunteers could verify the findings of only about 40 percent of the studies. In 1934, Congress set limits on lobbying activities for charities followed by limits on other political activities in the 1950s. Allen Gibson Salary Infomation 2022 | ERI Economic Research Institute And those are just a few of the people who are calling out iffy science with Arnold funding. However, after 17 years as an energy trader, I feel that its time to pursue other interests, Arnold wrote to investors in a letter obtained by NGI. The Arnolds' impact investing includes CivicaRx, which plans to manufacture 14 generic drugs and sell them cheap. The articles have to appear methodologically sound, but this is generally a lower standard than being completely convincing. . Dr. Andrew Nerlinger is a physician, venture capital investor, and social impact innovator. A former executive at Salomon Brothers later told The New York Times that there were very few incidents in the history of Wall Street comparable to Arnolds success that year. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Form 990s and Section 501(c) of the U.S. Tax Code were created in 1954, followed by rules governing private foundations in 1969.