Steve Cohen (businessman)

Steven A. Cohen (born June 11, 1956) is an American hedge-fund manager and owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball since September 14, 2020, owning just over 97% of the team.

He is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Management and S.A.C. Capital Advisors, which closed after pleading guilty to insider trading and other financial crimes.

Cohen graduated from John L. Miller Great Neck North High School in 1974, where he played on the school's soccer team.

Cohen received an economics degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

While in school, Cohen was initiated as a brother of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity's Theta chapter, where he served as treasurer.

While at Penn, a friend helped him open a brokerage account with $1,000 of his tuition money.

In 1978, after graduating from Penn, Cohen got a Wall Street job as a junior trader in the options-arbitrage department at Gruntal & Co. On his first day on the job at Gruntal & Co., he made an $8,000 profit.

He eventually would go on to make the company around $100,000 a day and eventually managed a $75 million portfolio and six traders.

Throughout the late 1980s, the Securities and Exchange Commission became suspicious that Cohen had used inside information in December 1985 when he bet that RCA and GE would merge, ahead of the announcement.

The SEC called him to testify, but he refused to answer any questions, invoking his right against self-incrimination.

Then, the SEC started looking into his other investments from the same period, especially those involving Brett K. Lurie.

Cohen was running his trading group at Gruntal & Co. by 1984 and continued running it until he started his own company, SAC Capital, in 1992.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Pierre N. Leval said that Patricia Cohen had made a "plausible" allegation that Steven Cohen had concealed the $5.5 million during negotiations on a separation agreement in 1989, which preceded the divorce.

The revival of the lawsuit came amid mounting pressure on Steven Cohen over an insider-trading investigation that led to the arrest of Michael Steinberg, one of Cohen's closest confidantes at SAC Capital.

SAC affiliates reached two civil insider trading settlements totaling nearly $616 million with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

SAC neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in either case.

In 1992, Cohen started S.A.C. Capital Advisors with $10 million of his own money and another $10 million from outside capital.

The company's name, 'SAC Capital', is derived from Steven A. Cohen's initials.

In 2003, the New York Times wrote that "SAC is one of the biggest hedge funds and is known for frequent and rapid trading."

In 2006, The Wall Street Journal reported that, while Cohen was once a rapid-fire trader who never held trading positions for extended periods, he now held an increasing number of equities for longer periods.

As of 2009, the firm managed $14 billion in equity.

In December 2009, Cohen and his brother Donald T. Cohen were sued by Steven's ex-wife Patricia Cohen for racketeering and insider-trading charges.

The SEC brought charges against many other S.A.C. employees from 2010 to 2013 with various outcomes.

On March 30, 2011, the United States District Court in Lower Manhattan dismissed the case, but, on April 3, 2013, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that a lower court had erred in dismissing fraud-based claims by his former spouse and revived the lawsuit.

The appeals court also revived claims of racketeering and breach of fiduciary duty while upholding the dismissal of an unjust-enrichment claim.

On November 20, 2012, Cohen was implicated in an alleged insider trading scandal involving an ex-SAC manager, Mathew Martoma.

In 2013, the Cohen-founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading and agreed to pay $1.8 billion in fines ($900 million in forfeiture and $900 million in fines) in one of the biggest criminal cases against a hedge fund.

Cohen was prohibited from managing outside money for two years as part of the settlement reached in the civil case over his accountability for the scandal.

The hedge fund agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and four counts of securities fraud and to close its doors to outside investors.

Cohen loosely inspired the character Bobby Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis, on the Showtime series Billions.

Cohen grew up in Great Neck, New York, where his father was a dress manufacturer in Manhattan's garment district and his mother was a piano teacher.

He grew up in a Jewish family.

He is the third of seven brothers and sisters.

He took a liking to poker as a high school student, often betting his own money in tournaments, and he credits the game with teaching him "how to take risks."

S.A.C. Capital Advisors "pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in 2013 and paid $1.8 billion in penalties" and was required to stop handling investments for outsiders.

Cohen "escaped criminal indictment himself despite being the living, breathing heart of S.A.C. Capital."

Martoma was convicted in 2014, in what federal prosecutors billed as the most profitable insider-trading conspiracy in history.

In 2014, Cohen founded Point72 Ventures, "a venture capital fund that makes early-stage investments".

The SEC later brought a civil lawsuit against Cohen, alleging his failure to supervise Martoma and Michael Steinberg, who was a senior employee and confidant of Cohen's. Cohen settled his civil case with regulators in January 2016; the agreement with the SEC prohibited Cohen from managing outside money until 2018.

He was featured in January 2017 The New Yorker article titled "When the Feds Went After the Hedge-Fund Legend Steven A. Cohen".