Reclusive U.S. billionaire Robert Mercer
helped Donald Trump win the
presidency. But what is his ultimate goal?
Bannon’s relationship with Robert Mercer is cited in a remarkable lawsuit brought by David Magerman, a former employee of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. On its surface, the lawsuit is a wrongful dismissal complaint against Mercer. But at its heart, it is an indictment of Mercer’s character and reputation that draws together his political views, his connections to Bannon and Trump and racist comments Mercer allegedly made to Magerman directly.
.. “I have a lot of respect for Bob Mercer. I think he’s a very intelligent person, a very thoughtful person,” Magerman told me recently. But he quickly added, “If the world knew what he was trying to do, they wouldn’t stand for it.”.. He’s fond of talking about the time, years ago, when a colleague he was visiting summoned a helicopter to his estate to whisk them into Manhattan.
There was no life-or-death reason for the extravagance, not even a business emergency. They were just going to a dinner, he says, and his friend rented the chopper to avoid the bother of traffic. From the helicopter, Magerman saw his fellow citizens travelling along a thin ribbon of perfectly good highway below.
.. “Either you are in awe of the grandeur of commuting, taking a two-hour drive and turning it into a helicopter ride, or you can just be, like, disgusted by the waste.” As though there were even a sliver of doubt, Magerman added, “I was in the latter category.”
It wasn’t just the waste that gnawed at him — it was the trespass of a moral principle. The helicopter commute was an example of something that, if everyone did it, would obviously be wrong. ”10,000 people can’t be flying helicopters from their backyard,” he said.
.. Magerman calls that helicopter trip “extra-societal” and “outside the realm of normal behavior,” words that also fit what he believes is wrong with Mercer’s relationship to the president. Magerman thinks Mercer has bought special access to impose “extra-societal” views on the Trump administration.
.. “The ultra-wealthy of today differ from the ultra-wealthy in past eras in that they have, a lot of them, no stake in the infrastructure of society,” Magerman said. He’s seen that their wealth does not depend on the health and stability of the country. In fact, they get rich on volatility and instability.
.. Mercer is not a finance guy; he is a computer scientist. But his research developing speech translation programs through pattern recognition can apparently also be used to discover obscure patterns in the financial markets and make an enormous fortune
.. Instead of poring over prospectuses and profit and loss statements, they apply their sciences to the data that affect markets. It’s called quantitative analysis, and they themselves are known as “quants.”
.. Medallion has pumped out annualized returns of almost 80 per cent a year, before fees.” Even in a bad year, it churns out more than 20 per cent returns.
.. “The people I worked with were great scientists. I mean, we could have solved a lot of important and interesting problems if we’d worked on different things. Instead, we made hundreds of millions of dollars,
.. The problem that Renaissance Technologies faced trying to predict market behaviour is, he said, essentially the same problem that Cambridge Analytica faces in voter analysis and persuasion.
.. Data analysts are largely skeptical that Cambridge Analytica could have had a decisive impact on the 2016 U.S. election or the Brexit referendum, but Magerman brushes that off with a reminder that so-called experts were also skeptical that computer algorithms could predict financial markets.
.. , “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the president’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it all to fall down.”
.. They didn’t get rich by providing the goods, services and infrastructure that bring people into direct contact with their community and its interests — they got rich in financial markets, making money for the sake of it.
.. But the real shrinking of the role of government has been in Trump’s choice of cabinet members, whose aim seems to be to assail the policy goals of their departments.
Thus, the
secretary of energy is someone who once campaigned to get rid of the Energy Department; the
Secretary of Education has advocated against the public schools system; the
Environmental Protection Agency director has a record of repeatedly suing the EPA; and the
Attorney General has a reputation for opposing the expansion of civil rights.
Other departments are reportedly withering from neglect, as key positions are filled by unqualified people or not filled at all.
.. his daughter Rebekah was part of the transition team that helped Trump choose his cabinet.
.. Was it all worth it?
“It’s like, was having surgery worth it?” Magerman says. “I mean, it was necessary. There was a disease that I thought, like, maybe I had a scintilla of a cure for.”
when Trump was stalking me [in the 2016 televised presidential debates] and leering and, oh, just generally trying to dominate me on this little stage, my mind was like: OK, I practised being calm and composed, you know, because that’s what a president should be. But, boy, would I love to turn around and say: “Back off, you creep.” But I didn’t, because I thought then his side will say: “See, she can’t take it. If she can’t take Donald standing there like the alpha male that he is, then how’s she going to stand up to Putin?” A ridiculous argument, but nevertheless one that might get traction. And, as you say, even your friends are like: “Oh, come on, don’t take the bait. Don’t take the bait.”
.. Being an academic gives you a bit of freedom to play around with things, because in the end what people think about me doesn’t matter all that much. But I remember when I first did telly, a clever, nasty but well-respected TV critic here said, basically: “You look like the back end of a bus. How dare you come into our living room with those teeth? If you’re going to inflict yourself on us, please will you smarten up.” After the first shock, I thought, look, sunshine, if you line up a load of women between 55 and 65, they’ll mostly look like me. So, I wrote a piece pointing out that he was not abusing me only, he was abusing every woman who looked a bit like me.
HC I think you touched a chord when you said: “OK, this is what a woman looks like.” When you run for office, however, what a president looks like is not any kind of woman. So therefore how you feel about this particular woman is influenced by how you feel about women in really powerful positions
.. MB When I looked back to the ancient world about this, Romans in particular were always saying that women, in some way, are fake. The problem about a woman is that she’s always made up, she’s never what she seems.
.. HC Men can get a haircut; it doesn’t change their authenticity. They can grow a beard; they are still who they are. Whereas we are constantly held to that good old double standard, which is so complex and deep and charged with historical and mythological and cultural totems.
.. MB Your book has turned me yet more against presidential debates. I mean, what did I learn from the debates? I learned absolutely nothing that I didn’t think I knew already. I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I’d vote for Hillary if I had a vote. So to say: “I don’t think we’ll have a debate this year,” seems antidemocratic. But democracy has to think a bit harder about the dissemination of knowledge.
.. HCPart of the reason I prepared [for them], and part of the reason I had such an extensive, substantive policy portfolio, is that there have been, in the past, moments of reckoning, where a smart moderator will really pin you down: “OK, you say you want to do this on taxes – what will be the impact on economic growth?” I mean, something that’s a little more sophisticated and really does require you to be on your toes. But that didn’t happen this time at all.
.. And the Greeks would have seen this. Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
.. There is a deliberate, very well‑organised, sophisticated assault on facts and reason and evidence. In our country, it’s driven originally by a cabal of billionaires and religious fundamentalists, and their view is that it doesn’t matter what they say. If they say it often enough and they put enough money behind it, they’ll convince a significant number of people.
.. But you’re in a double bind, as a historian or a politician or any job where expertise is required. You don’t want to say: “Only politicians are allowed to talk about foreign policy.” You want to share and debate with people who’ve got different opinions, of course you do – but actually you sometimes need to have read something about it.
HC And he knows it and he knows how to play it. It’s very deliberate. The same with Trump. I mean, it’s a persona that they have assumed, which really works for them, even the same kind of hair. The hair is part of the whole deal.
MB And it is so contrived, and it is contrived to look so spontaneous, it makes you sick.
.. HC It’s interesting, because men’s roles in public life are somewhat evolving. It used to be: you go for the sober character on the right or the left, who you think represents your views and whose platform you support. They could come in different sizes and shapes, but there was an assumption they were serious people, even if they had a good sense of humour, right?
Now, because of what I think is the pressure of performance, which is more important than substance by a long shot, it is the performance that matters most. We’re going to see more of this type. And I think then it’s particularly hard to pin down and make the argument about position and facts versus performance and rhetoric.
MB When I debated with Boris about Greece versus Rome, it was a fun charity gig, but it revealed precisely that. Boris is very funny. He can work an audience. I admire it. I knew the only way I was going to have a chance of winning was by being fantastically prepared.
HC That sounds very familiar. [Laughter.]
.. MB It’s back to the old version that was prevalent at university when I was an undergraduate – you know, that it was the women who were in on the Saturday nights doing the work, and they were very diligent, but they didn’t really have that…
HC They didn’t have the creative…
MB The flair. So, they were awfully reliable – and by awfully reliable, you mean very boring. Whereas, somehow, what both Boris and Trump have done is they’ve branded themselves around gaffes, so that it no longer makes a difference. One extra gaffe doesn’t matter, because that’s the brand.
HC Women are going to have to learn how to pull off that trick. I think it’s difficult, but it has to be possible, because there’s no alternative.
“The decision is an important step to vindicate the principle that the public has a right to access the California coast regardless of their wealth and resources,” Buescher told The Post, calling the gate and use of guards a “defacto privatization of what is an incredibly valuable public resource.” The decision also ordered Khosla to pay nearly $500,000 in attorney costs.
.. The suit came after community members and Surfriders sought an amicable solution, Howe and Buescher said. Protests and letter-writing campaigns to apply public pressure failed. The situation escalated in October 2012, when the San Mateo County sheriff cited a group of five surfers on the beach for trespassing. The charges were dropped in 2013.
.. In 2014, the state lands commission sought to end the legal battle by paying to create road or sidewalk access to the beach on Khosla’s property, or to use a portion of the road. Surveyors estimated a price of $300,000. Khosla countered with an offer of about $30 million.
A new analysis of 2016 data shows that five men now possess as much wealth as half of the world’s population combined. The five men—Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Spanish businessman Amancio Ortega, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, American investor Warren Buffett and Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim—combined hold $400 billion. Slim is a major shareholder in The New York Times, while Bezos owns The Washington Post.