Billionaire financier George Soros has been overtaken by former US President Donald Trump on Bloomberg’s index of the world’s richest people, it was revealed Tuesday.
The US news outlet’s updated rankings showed the prominent liberal donor at number 378 on the list with an estimated $7.16 billion net worth. Trump was ranked just above Soros at the 377th slot in the ranking.
The former US president’s net worth more than doubled this year after his Trump Media & Technology Group merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp. Trump Media & Technology Group owns and operates the real estate mogul’s Truth Social online platform, where Trump took refuge after being banned from Twitter (now X). His increased wealth also places him above figures like Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings.
Soros’ net worth has changed little in recent years as the 93-year-old former hedge fund manager devotes his attention to social causes. He’s perhaps best known in Europe as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England;” his short sale of the British pound sterling netted him $1 billion in profit during the UK’s 1992 Black Wednesday financial crisis.
The wealthy financier’s political giving has made him a controversial figure. A 1991 article in the Washington Post dubbed Soros an “overt operative” of US-backed regime change operations in Europe. Alongside US government organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Soros funnels his massive wealth towards pro-Western activists who help bring down Russian and socialist-aligned governments.
Author William Blum describes a striking example of such tactics in his 1995 classic Killing Hope. When voters returned popular socialist parties to power in post-communist Albania and Bulgaria, the NED lavished opposition groups with millions of dollars to foment political unrest. Massive protests forced the collapse of both governments, which were replaced by neoliberal parties committed to economic reforms in the interest of Western capital.
After their economies were hollowed out, Eastern European countries were then integrated into Western institutions like the European Union and NATO, further surrendering their sovereignty to leaders in Washington and Brussels.
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The strategy was repeated again and again over the next several years, with donors like Soros pouring millions into ostensibly “pro-democracy” causes. Soros helped fund two such “color revolutions” on Russia’s border, once during Ukraine’s so-called “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and again during the 2014 Maidan coup. In both cases elected leaders aligned with Russia were overthrown in favor of pro-Western governments that dramatically shifted Ukraine’s political allegiances.
The reconstruction was later found by a Ukrainian court to be a complete fabrication, a piece of “deliberate fraud and disinformation” that allowed Soros to interfere in Ukraine with deadly consequences.
Soros has since poured his resources into influencing US politics, funding organizations that promote censorship on social media in the name of “combatting disinformation” and lobby for sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela. In 2022 Soros was the single largest donor to Democratic Party-aligned causes, just above disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.
The influential billionaire’s defenders often claim criticism of Soros is antisemitic, but a cursory analysis of his outsized global influence demonstrates his conduct is ripe for critique.