A Conversation With Bill Browder
figure out what to do post-business school, I had this epiphany, which was that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, I was going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that led me to London, and it ultimately lead me to Salomon Brothers, which doesn’t exist anymore but was a very famous Wall Street firm, probably the most famous Wall Street firm, immortalized in a book called Liar’s Poker , which I recommend everyone read if you haven’t read it already. And that’s when I became a financier. That’s when I became a financier focused on Eastern Europe. And that led me to all the other dramas of my life. Dan Ferris: Yeah. And those dramas are really quite substantial. Let’s talk about the time just before you were expelled from Russia in 2005. In retrospect, when I look back at that, it really took you by surprise, and I suppose it took lots of other people by surprise. Against all expectation, at least as far as a provincial guy like me is concerned – put it that way – you staged successful activist campaigns against corporate corruption not in the United States but in Russia of all places. I would’ve guessed that you wouldn’t have survived that and then gotten as far as you did. Bill Browder: Well, it was an odd set of circumstances, again. So what happened was: After I left Salomon Brothers, I moved to Moscow in 1996 and I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund. I started with almost no assets under management. But
Dan Ferris: I read your book, Red Notice ... It was an excellent, thrilling – in all the wrong ways – story. But before you got to all the events in the book, how old were you when you first realized that finance was going to be your career direction? Bill Browder: I was pretty young. And my ambitions came about from a very unusual set of circumstances. I come from a family of American communists. My grandfather, Earl Browder, was the head of the Communist Party of the United States of America from 1932 to 1945. He ran for president against Roosevelt as a communist in 1936 and 1940. He was imprisoned in 1941, pardoned in 1942, expelled from the Community Party in 1945, and then ultimately persecuted
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I was trying to figure out the best way of rebelling from this family of communists... which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist.
very viciously during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. So when I was going through my teenage rebellion, I was trying to figure out the best way of rebelling from this family of communists, and I came up with this great idea, which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. And I became a capitalist at the age of 17. I eventually found my way to Stanford business school in 1987, graduating in 1989, which was the year that the Berlin Wall came down. And as I was trying to
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June 2020
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