Arnold says he wasnt sure if he could match the success hed enjoyed as a futures trader at Enron. The picture Taubes painted wasnt of a flawed study here or there but of a fundamentally broken scientific culture. . Brian Nosek had pretty much given up on finding a funder. 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. John D. Arnold is an American philanthropist and businessman. All rights reserved. He was formerly Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. 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. [47], John Arnold and his brother Matthew[48] tore down historical homes in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston which led to criticism by architectural conservationists. We are able to use resources in another structure. Arnold has said that the first phase of his life was 100 percent trying to make money and that its now 100 percent trying to do good.. Fix terrible science. In 1934, Congress set limits on lobbying activities for charities followed by limits on other political activities in the 1950s. Arnold estimates that he made $50,000 before he finished high school. Philanthropy Is for the Living. . are the four most dangerous words, Arnold wrote on Twitter. Foerster and Marny Eng and musician John Oates on the way that music and imagery can combine to drive narrative, the dramatic heart at the core of the new independent comedy/drama 'Gringa' and the level of difficulty involved in post-pandemic independent film distribution. The listings let him see that the same cards were sold at different prices in different parts of the countrywhich presented an opportunity for arbitrage. In 2014 he partnered with the journal Psychological Science to offer colorful Open Data and Open Materials badges for papers that met specific criteria for sharing. Arnold is 5'10", trim, and blandly handsome, his unusually youthful appearance now somewhat concealed by a salt-and-pepper beard. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California,. But among hedge funders and energy traders, Arnold is a legend. View Subscription Options Reflects change since 5 pm ET of prior trading day. Insofar as the LLC form allows donors to treat the categories as just so many rooms for a tiresome accounting game of hide-and-seekthe view that Arnold seems to take herewe may come to regret the growing popularity of that form among those with the largest appetites for change. Aiming to defend the science behind the guidelines, McGovern suggested that the doubts that had been cast over Americas nutrition science were being driven by a former Enron executive. I dont know what Enron knows about dietary guidelines, McGovern said. 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. Mr. Arnold serves on the boards of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an investor-led venture capital firm dedicated to funding transformational technologies that will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions; Civica, Inc., a nonprofit generic pharmaceutical company; and The City Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting new governance models in K-12 education. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. The foundational studies, Taubes said, looked at the diets and disease rates in various countries, then essentially guessed at which items in the diet were responsible for the countrys good or bad health statistics. We support the principles of individual liberty, a free market economy and limited constitutional government: These are the cornerstones of American society. You have 3 free articles remaining. Those who support ICERs formula believe it could lower prices while critics argue that the formula is discriminator toward the elderly and those with disabilities or rare diseases. A month after legendary natural gas trader Arnold abruptly announced that his Houston-based Centaurus would wind down its $2 billion master fund following a decade of unrivalled gains, Whalley. And its true that, when it comes to political leanings, they are somewhat hard to pin down. Abandoning traditional nonprofits in favor of LLCs may be the ultimate expression of donor privacy under the First Amendment, but it also means rejecting our philanthropic institutions at a time when so much of the nonprofit landscape is made up of policy groups. Credit: Arnold Ventures. Longevity evangelists are injecting people with experimental gene therapies. Yellen warned inaction could have wide-ranging financial repercussions, including on taxpayers and the federal governments credit rating. Subscribe now. . When former Enron trader and Texas billionaire John Arnold donated more than $1 million to a November 2014 initiative to reform the public pension system in . Hockey cards didnt have much of a market in Texas, he tells me. It was little wonder, then, that funders didnt come running to support Nosek: He wasnt promising novel findings, he was promising to question them. [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. Let us know if we're missing any workplace or industry recognition - Add Awards. Philanthropist John Arnold is pictured in this photo provided by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation on July 10, 2018. . In a glass conference room at the Arnold Foundations officeswhich occupy the same space as the old Centaurus trading floor, a 15-minute drive from the glass tower whose entrance was once adorned with Enrons famous EArnold explains that his and Lauras initial plan had been to simply locate the most effective organizations and write them checks. Since April 2011, Mr. Gibson has served as the Chief Investment Officer of Centaurus Capital LP (Centaurus), a private investment partnership with interests in oil and gas, private equity, structured finance, and the debt capital markets. Not long after the podcast went online, he received a five-line email from Arnold. 5. This article appears in the February issue. John At age 38, Texas billionaire John Arnold decided to step away from high finance. The Arnolds have a multiple-decade timeline to work on problems. Yet the most remarkable thing about the Arnold Foundations research integrity projects is that they already appear to be paying off. One floor on top of the next. In nutrition, the whole foundation of the research had been flawed. Previously, Mr. Arnold founded and was CEO of Centaurus Energy, a multi-billion dollar energy commodity hedge fund. Part Not surprisingly, researchers who dont see a crisis in science have started to fight back. founded Houston-based hedge fund Centaurus Advisors but retired in 2012 . [8][12] His former colleagues dubbed him "king of natural gas. He holds a B.A. [38], In 2020, Arnold was one of ten billionaires who had given away at least 20% of their wealth. [3][8] His father was a lawyer and died when Arnold was 18. 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. Qu u c Centaurus Energy ca Arnold, hin ang qun l hn 5 t USD gi tr ti sn, cha bao gi kim c li nhun t hn 50% . ISSN 2577-9877 In finance, meanwhile, at least when one is trading with ones own money, there are strong incentives to work to that stronger standard. [30] The new entity is known as Arnold Ventures LLC with the charter "to remove barriers between data and decisive action, working swiftly across the policy-change spectrum. 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. Centaurus Capital LP has committed around $500 million in equity for EOC Partners, according to the . Washington DC | New York | Houston | Pittsburgh | Mexico City Calgary | Chile. On the morning of October 7, 2015, the US House Agriculture Committee convened a hearing on the controversy surrounding the dietary guidelines, fueled by the BMJ article. And in 2015 the Arnold Foundation paid journalist Nina Teicholz to investigate the scientific review process that informs the US Dietary Guidelines. At the time, his net worth was estimated to be around $3 billion. | Arnold was raised in Dallas, Texas, and he was the younger of two sons. [52], , "Centaurus scoops up National Coal shares", Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, "The Young Billionaire Behind the War on Bad Science", "John Arnold Is Said to Close Hedge Fund and Return Investor Money", "When a billionaire trader loses his edge - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blogTerm Sheet", "Houston billionaire trader John Arnold retiring at 38 - Houston Chronicle", "Legendary Energy Trader John Arnold to Retire", "Hedge Fund Billionaire John Arnold's Fund Was Up When He Announced He Was Getting Out", "Ex-Trader at Enron to Retire From Hedge Fund", New York Times: "CORPORATE CONDUCT: THE TRADER; Enron Trader Had a Year To Boast of, Even If" By DAVID BARBOZA, "A speculator who is in for the long haul", "Centaurus's John Arnold: The king of natural gas - Nov. 24, 2009", "Meet the Texas billionaire who backed Philly soda tax and now is funding attack ads in N.J. Senate race", "Smart trades that made this a good year for some", "Centaurus scoops up National Coal shares", "John D. Arnold's CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission) speech", "Houston's World Cup bid adds a power player in John Arnold", "A Thirtysomething Billionaire Couple Take on Tough Issues Via Giving", "The City Fund has given out over $100 million to support charter and charter-like schools", How a billionaire couple greased the skids for Nancy Pelosis drug pricing bill, "Why this billion-dollar foundation is becoming a corporation", "Changemakers: The Leaders Reshaping Communities Around the World", "Two Texas Billionaires Think They Can Fix Philanthropy", "A Billionaire Pledges to Fight High Drug Prices, and the Industry Is Rattled", "Obscure Model Puts a Price on Good Healthand Drives Down Drug Costs", "How a Billionaire Couple Greased The Skids For Nancy Pelosi's Drug Pricing Bill", "Laura and John Arnold Foundation to Restructure as LLC", "Why one billionaire is calling out Silicon Valley's favorite philanthropic loophole", "Are Donor Advised Funds Good for Philanthropy? Updated March 10, 2017 5:18 pm ET. In 2007, Arnold became the youngest billionaire in the U.S.[1] His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund specializing in trading energy products that closed in 2012. ), Were not looking to create an organization of safe success, Laura Arnold says. And so, at age 38, Arnold walked away from it all. Hes nowhere near as rich as he boasts, nor as poor as his critics claim. [15], He then founded Centaurus, a hedge fund, with his previous year's bonus in 2002. In everything they do, they want to be evidence-driven, says Stuart Buck, vice president of research integrity at the Arnold Foundation. Hard-working business innovator Daymond John has been known to say that he is "retired" because hes doing what he loves - helping other people succeed. The Reproducibility Project, meanwhile, swelled to include more than 270 researchers working to reproduce 100 psychology experimentsand in August 2015, Nosek revealed its results. W hen former Enron trader and billionaire hedge-fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura, announced plans to donate 5 percent of their net worth to charity every year, they may have. Early the next morning, Mr. Arnold offered a bid after making the following observations: "I . In May 2012, John announced his retirement from Centaurus Energy to concentrate on philanthropic activities. Weve always defined success as sustainable change through policy. Amaranth, which was gambling with money from large pension funds, suffered a $6 billion loss and collapsed. Were looking to create an organization of thoughtful failure and fantastic success., Arnold is, in at least one respect, trying to make science a little more like finance. IN THEIR philanthropy, the Arnolds like to say, they follow data where it leads rather than let themselves be guided by ideology. Former Enron Corp. energy trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus Energy Master Hedge Fund. From the little I know about the science of nutrition, your study makes a lot of sense, Arnold wrote. The aim was to redo about 50 studies from three prominent psychology journals, to establish an estimate of how often modern psychology turns up false positive results. (WIRED wrote about NuSI in issue 22.09). The No. The problem even had a name: the file drawer effect. They are on record as agreeing with some of the critiques and focus on partnering with organizations to maximize their impact without undue influence. Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. Former Enron Corp. energy trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus Energy Master Hedge Fund. By the following year, Nosek was cofounding an institution called the Center for Open Science with an initial $5.25 million grant from the Arnold Foundation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. His next act? By the time he was 14, Arnold was running his first company, selling collectible sports cards across state lines. What does that say about American philanthropy? 4. The BMJ investigation, in turn, met with angry denunciations from nutrition experts who had worked on the US Dietary Guidelines; a petition asking the journal to retract Teicholzs work was signed by more than 180 credentialed professionals. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, launched a similar LLC (the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) in 2015, with Zuckerberg transferring some 99 percent of his shares in the social media company to the LLCan amount reportedly exceeding $45 billion. Closing That same hunger would make large-scale philanthropy far more challenging than he had anticipated. Now He's Declared War on Bad Science. By recreating an early state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, scientists hope to understand the conditions that made the universe what it is today. . 171 on Forbes list. Wealth: $3.3 billion. To promote preregistration, the Center for Open Science offered the first 1,000 scientists who preregister their studies with the organization $1,000 each. She and her husband John,. The tech giant is helping researchers and clinicians decipher vast amounts of data generated by people with persistent symptoms. John Arnold, Centaurus Energy . 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. [17] August 2008, Centaurus acquired around 10% of the shares of National Coal Corporation (NCOC). His mother was an accountant (she would later help manage the books at his hedge fund). [8] In 1996, a year after starting at Enron,[8] he moved to oversee the trading of natural gas derivatives at the Natural Gas Desk upon the departure of Jeff Bussan. But when I visit the Arnold Foundations Houston headquarters in June, Laura has been called away on a family emergency, leaving John to do the talking. More than $10 million more in Arnold Foundation grants have come since. John Arnold is Founder and Co-Chair of Arnold Ventures. Copyright 2012Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1532-1231 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. For two and a half hours, a roomful of testy representatives asked why certain nutrition studies had been privileged over others. 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. Just weeks before the federal guidelines were due for an update, Teicholzs blistering report appeared in the prominent medical journal The BMJ, charging that the governments panel of scientists had failed to consider evidence that would have done away with long-held worries about eating saturated fat. Of course, this new LLC model comes with the cost of losing the Arnold Foundations tax exemption. Arnold had always been ready to make huge bets, but it was ultimately his hunger for reliable data that made him a brilliant trader. Founded in 1992, Centaurus was formed with a singular focus - to provide unparalleled service, support, technology, and education to independent financial advisers in the securities industry. 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. Fortune magazine has called him one of the least-known billionaires in the country. In the past ten years, we have achieved more success than I could have hoped for or imagined. 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. Bothersome bureaucracy notwithstanding, tax exemption and tax deduction are tangible benefits that acknowledge that compact. In Charlottes largest labor demonstration in two decades, about 450 American Airlines pilots protested the slow pace of contract talks near an entrance to Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Monday. 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. A new study shows . Ultimately his army of volunteers could verify the findings of only about 40 percent of the studies. Laura and John Arnold, co-founders and co-chairs of Arnold Ventures. [28] From 2010-2013, the Arnolds were heavily involved in the Innocence Project which led to their interest in criminal reform. 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. Rank: 590. John Arnold, Centaurus Energy - $1.5 billion. 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. In 2012 the former head of cancer research at the biotech firm Amgen revealed the results of the companys effort to replicate 53 landmark papers in hematology and oncology; only six studies findings could be confirmed. Theyve also lavishly supported the Reproducibility Project, a science reform group formed to combat the rise of politicized, ideologically driven junk science afflicting so much research, particularly in climate science. [34] Arnold also has been an influential supporter of Democrats efforts to pass a drug-price reform bill. His net worth of $10.2 billion landed him at No. To be fair, the Arnolds are far from wild-eyed leftists. But given the long history of deep-pocketed business interests sowing doubt in research, his underlying question was a fair one: Who is John Arnold, and why is he spending so much money to raise questions about science? John Arnold managed to walk away from Enrons 2001 collapse with a seven-figure bonus and no accusations of wrongdoing attached to his name. Arnold was given $8 million, the biggest payout of all, just days before Enron filed for bankruptcy. What's Fishbowl. They internalize the risk of mistaking correlation for causationnot because theyre smarter than scientists but because they have money riding on the outcome. [29] The Foundation is focused on evidence-backed giving for systematic change. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. He started Centaurus the next year, bringing along a small group of former Enron traders, who worked out of a single large room. All Rights Reserved. After making millions for Enron, launching his own hedge fund, and becoming a billionaire, John Arnold retired at 38. [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. [25][1] The organization was founded in 2010. John Arnold shocked the hedge fund world in 2012 when, at just 38 years old, he announced he would no longer manage other people's money. That's what the Arnold Foundation did last week, when it announced that it would be combining its philanthropy and political giving under Arnold Ventures. John, Nosek learned, had made his first millions as a wunderkind natural gas trader at Enron, the infamous energy company, and hed managed to walk away from Enrons 2001 collapse with a seven-figure bonus and no accusations of wrongdoing attached to his name. He was an entrepreneurial kid, earning some $50,000 before leaving high school by marketing collectible sports cards in the internets early years. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Yale Law School, and has a Master of Philosophy degree in European Studies from the University of Cambridge. Arnold funds Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), a nonprofit that created a formula to price drugs. CRC respects confidentiality and will not share your e-mail address. But as it happens, Nosek is just one of many researchers who have received unsolicited emails from the Arnold Foundation in the past few yearsresearchers involved in similar rounds of soul-searching and critique in their own fields, who have loosely amounted to a movement to fix science. One is literally betting on ones research.. Yet the foundation is also focused on reforming what the Arnolds see as a broken public pension systema project that, in practice, usually means cutting payments to retirees, raising retirement ages, and switching new workers to 401(k)-style plans. Had something similar happened on Wall Street, he tweeted, the perpetrator would have been sentenced to 10 years in jail and the bank would have been fined a billion dollars. At least, not exactly. Weve always wanted to change policies. NGI All News Access. The Therapy Part of Psychedelic Therapy Is a Mess. What do we actually know?. ioneer Ltd has gained a substantial shareholder in Centaurus Capital L.P, which now holds a 7.84% stake with more than 131.5 million shares.This status was reached after US-based Centaurus . Arnold Ventures' John Arnold: Now is the Time to Reform Charitable Giving Laws. He is also the Co-founder of PandemicTech, an Austin-based venture philanthropy launched in 2016 that supports health security innovators on the . Nonprofits must file annual Form 990 financial reports with the IRS, disclosing their revenues, employee compensation, grant recipients, and (in the case of foundations) their donors. Arnold Ventures is a group of more than 100 passionate people from all walks of life who feel a deep urgency to help people in need. 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." . In 2011 Centaurus Energy Master Fund LP was fined $75,000 by the New York Mercantile Exchange for violating position limits in natural gas trading (see Daily GPI, Dec. 28, 2011). That's the true story of former star Enron trader John Arnold, who most recently worked as a hedge fund manager. 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. While the industry as a whole and Centaurus itself have evolved dramatically since our inception, the uncompromising focus of the . It became one of the biggest science stories of the year. At the Center for Open Science, Nosek has already begun to experiment with new incentives for scientists. [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. Centaurus will be returning capital to investors, according to a Reuters report. So he ran his projects on a shoestring budget, self-financing them with his own earnings from corporate speaking engagements on his research about bias.
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