Early life

Cohen grew up in a Jewish family in Great Neck, New York, where his father was a dress manufacturer in Manhattan's garment district, and his mother was a part-time piano teacher. He has 7 other brothers and sisters, in which he is the 3rd oldest. From oldest to youngest: Marty Cohen, Gary Cohen, Steven Cohen, Cindy Cohen, Donald Cohen, Stacey Cohen, Wendy Cohen, and Russell Cohen. He took a liking to poker as a high school student, often betting his own money in tournaments. Cohen credits the game with teaching him "how to take risks." Cohen received an economics degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. He was a brother of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, Theta Chapter. While in school, a friend helped him open a brokerage account with $1,000 of his tuition money.

Career

After Wharton, Cohen got a Wall Street job as a junior trader in the options arbitrage department at Gruntal & Co. in 1978, where he eventually managed a $75 million portfolio and six traders.

His first day on the job at Gruntal & Co., he made an $8,000 profit. He would eventually go on to make the company around $100,000 a day. Cohen was running his own trading group at Gruntal by 1984, and continued running it until he started his own company, SAC.

In 1992, Cohen started SAC Capital Partners with $20 million of his own money; as of 2009, the firm managed $14 billion in equity. Originally known as a rapid-fire trader who never held trading positions for extended periods of time, Cohen now holds an increasing number of equities for longer periods of time.

Wealth

In 2014, Forbes Magazine estimated Cohen's fortune at $10.3 billion in September 2014, ranking him the 35th richest person in the United States.

In 1998, the Cohen family purchased a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) home on 14 acres (57,000 m2) in Greenwich, Connecticut.

His 2005 compensation was reportedly $1 billion, considerably higher than his 2004 compensation ($450 million), 2001 compensation ($428 million), and 2003 compensation ($350 million). In addition, Cohen owns 7% of search engine Baidu and owns 5% of SSD design firm OCZ Technology.

In February 2013 Forbes listed Cohen as one of the 40 Highest-Earning hedge fund managers. In December 2013, Cohen's New York penthouse in the highly coveted Bloomberg Tower was listed for sale for 98 million dollars. Cohen is one of the minority owners of the New York Mets, and holds a four percent stake in the baseball team.

Art collector

Cohen began collecting art in 2000, and has since become a prominent collector, appearing on Art News magazine's "Top 10" list of biggest-spending art collectors around the world each year since 2002, and Forbes magazine's "Top Billionaire Art Collectors" list in 2005. To date, Cohen has bought around $700 million worth of artwork; in 2003, the New York Times reported that in a five-year period, Cohen spent 20% of his income at art auctions.

Cohen previously owned between 4.7% and 5.9% of the stock of Sotheby's auction house, which had been described as a "significant stake." S.E.C. filings by June 2009 showed that SAC Capital had sold all of its Sotheby’s stock.

He is reportedly building a private museum for some of his artwork on his Greenwich property. In 2005, it was reported that Cohen had previously bought Edvard Munch's Madonna for $11.5 million in 1999.

His tastes in collecting changed quickly from Impressionist painters to contemporary art. While he has collected works from important emerging artists such as Adam Pendleton, he is most famous for collecting 'trophy' art—signature works by famous artists—including a Pollock drip painting from David Geffen for $52 million and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a piece that the artist had bought back from Charles Saatchi for $8 million. In the last two years, he reportedly paid $25 million each for a Warhol and a Picasso. He is a major patron of the Marianne Boesky art gallery.

He has purchased some unusual art works. In 2006, Cohen remarked that repairing his suspended shark artwork, a cost estimated to be a minimum of $100,000, was an "inconsequential" expense. Since the shark itself is over 10 years old, it has begun to rot and requires replacement. The replacement shark has already been caught; once the exhibit is fixed, Cohen will have it moved into his SAC office. Cohen has also placed Marc Quinn's Self, a head sculpture made of frozen blood, in the SAC lobby.

In addition, in 2006 Cohen bought a landscape entitled Police Gazette by artist Willem de Kooning for $63.5 million from David Geffen. Also in 2006, Cohen attempted to make the most expensive art purchase in history when he offered to purchase Picasso's Le Reve from casino mogul Steve Wynn for $139 million. Just days before the painting was to be transported to Cohen, Wynn, who suffers from poor vision due to retinitis pigmentosa, accidentally thrust his elbow through the painting while showing it to a group of acquaintances inside of his office at Wynn Las Vegas. The purchase was canceled, and Wynn still held the painting until early November, 2012, when Cohen finally acquired the painting for $150 million. In November 2006, Cohen purchased another Willem de Kooning painting, Woman III, from David Geffen for $137.5 million.

Philanthropy

Cohen and his wife Alexandra have donated over quarter of a billion dollars over the last decade to projects involved in health, education, arts & culture, and New York community. The Cohens have donated large sums to a number of hospitals, with a particular focus on pediatric care. They gave the Long Island Jewish Medical and the North Shore University Hospital $55 million to expand pediatric care. The Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital at the NY Presbyterian Cornell Weill Medical Center received a $50 million donation. More recently, they donated $35 million to the NYU Medical Center to go towards a new mental health research center for war veterans to study post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries, and committed $275 million to establishing mental health centers for veterans nationwide.

The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation gave a grant in excess of $100,000 to the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in 2014, to support arts education and family programming.

Recognition

Dubbed "the hedge fund king" in a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, Time Magazine ranked him 94th in 2007 on its annual Time 100 list of most influential people. In 2011 he was included in the 50 Most Influential ranking of Bloomberg Markets Magazine.

Controversy

On November 20, 2012, according to The Wall Street Journal, Cohen was implicated in an alleged insider trading scandal involving an ex-SAC manager, Mathew Martoma. Cohen was not directly named in an indictment released in New York, but was referred to as "Portfolio Manager A" "according to people familiar with the matter." The SEC later brought a civil lawsuit against Cohen, concerning his supervisory duties toward Martoma and Michael Steinberg, a senior employee and confidant of Cohen's. The case against Steinberg was dropped in October 2015, weakening the SEC's case against Cohen. A settlement was announced in January 2016, which prohibits Cohen from managing outside money until 2018.

The SEC brought charges against a number of other S.A.C. employees from 2010 to 2013, with various outcomes. Martoma was convicted in what federal prosecutors billed as the most profitable insider-trading conspiracy in history. Martoma sought to have his conviction overturned in 2015; he was the eighth present or former SAC Capital employee found guilty on insider-trading charges. The hedge fund itself pleaded guilty to similar criminal charges in a $1.8 billion November settlement that requires it to stop handling investments for outsiders. Criminal charges were never brought against Cohen himself, but Dr. Sidney Gilman, the star prosecution witness against Martoma, testified that FBI agents told him Cohen was the investigation's ultimate target.

Personal life

Cohen has been married twice:

• In 1979, he married Patricia Finke, a New York native from a working-class background who grew up in the Washington Heights, Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. They had two children together. They divorced in 1990.
• In 1992, he married Alexandra Garcia, a working single mom of Puerto Rican Catholic descent who also grew up in Washington Heights. They have four children together. They live in Greenwich, Connecticut with their six children (their four children along with Alexandra's prior child and his two children with his first wife, Patricia).

Cohen serves on the Board of Trustees of Brown University and the New York-based Robin Hood Foundation.

In 1999, the publicity-shy trader granted one of his first on-the record interviews to Daniel Strachman for his book Getting Started In Hedge Funds (Wiley 2000).

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. On March 30, 2011, the United States District Court in Lower Manhattan dismissed the case, saying Ms. Cohen’s claims amounted to little more than speculation and rumor.

On April 3, 2013, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said a lower court had erred in dismissing fraud-based claims by his former spouse and revived the lawsuit. It also revived claims of racketeering and breach of fiduciary duty, while upholding the dismissal of an unjust enrichment claim.

Political donations

In 2015, Cohen and his wife donated $2 million to a Super PAC supporting the presidential candidacy of Chris Christie.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]