Julian Robertson

Julian Hart Robertson Jr. was born on June 25, 1932, in Salisbury, North Carolina, and grew up there. He recalled it as a small town that was a wonderful place to grow up. For high school, he attended the boarding school Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia.⁠[1][2][1][1]

Robertson later recalled that his parents and their friends were active in hometown philanthropy, supporting local schools, parks, hospitals, and two colleges, Livingstone and Catawba.⁠[3][3]

In 1955, Robertson graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity; after graduating, he served in the US Navy for two years.⁠[1][1][1]

After leaving the Navy, Robertson went to Wall Street as a stockbroker at Kidder, Peabody & Co.; by 1974, he was CEO of Webster Management Corporation, the firm’s investment advisory subsidiary.⁠[1][1]

In 1978, Robertson left Kidder, Peabody and traveled to New Zealand, planning to write a novel. He later said he had realized that the conventional approach of 85% stocks and 15% bonds was wrong, and that they should be running a hedge fund the way he ran his own account.⁠[1][1][1]

In 1980, at the age of 48, Robertson founded the long-short equity hedge fund Tiger Management, which later expanded into global equities, commodities, currencies, and bonds. The fund started with $8 million in assets and later grew to more than $21 billion.⁠[1][1]

Robertson and colleagues from Tiger Management established the Tiger Foundation, dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty in New York City; the Robertson Foundation dates its founding to 1989, while Robertson himself, in a 2010 letter, gave the year as 1990 and mentioned founding it with John Griffin. In the letter, he regarded the Tiger Foundation as the most successful venture he had a hand in starting, and said he hoped it would encourage the young people who worked for him to become philanthropists.⁠[4][3][3][3]

In 1995, Robertson bought a sheep farm near the Bay of Islands on New Zealand’s North Island, and over the following six years built the Kauri Cliffs championship golf course, designed by David Harman, and its lodge, which opened in 2001, marking the Robertson family’s first foray into the luxury hospitality industry.⁠[5][5][5][5]

In 1996, Robertson, his wife Josie, and their family established the Robertson Foundation, a private family foundation funding three areas: education, the environment, and medical research; in his 2010 letter, Robertson recalled that the couple started their own foundation in 1993. The foundation aims to grant approximately $100 million annually and does not accept unsolicited proposals.⁠[4][4][3][4]

In the same period, he established the Blanche & Julian Robertson Family Foundation in his hometown in memory of his parents, funding Salisbury and the surrounding area; its founding is recorded as both 1996 and late 1997.⁠[4][6]

Robertson’s investing was rooted in value investing, and his fund’s performance declined in the late 1990s as internet and tech stocks surged. A consistent critic of overvalued tech stocks, he closed his hedge fund in 2000 and returned money to investors, just before the dot-com bubble burst; Tiger Management then continued to operate as a family office managing his personal fortune.⁠[1][1][1]

In the same year, Robertson and his wife founded the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program to encourage exchange between student leaders at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; as of 2010, each school awarded 16 scholarships annually.⁠[4][3][3]

In 2004, Robertson and his wife established the Aotearoa Foundation in New Zealand, funding education, environment, and medical research projects in the Hawke’s Bay and Northland regions; in 2023, the foundation’s board decided to pause new grant-making and review its direction.⁠[4][7][7]

After Kauri Cliffs opened, the Robertson family bought a second farm in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, and built a championship golf course designed by Tom Doak; the lodge, The Farm at Cape Kidnappers, welcomed its first guests in 2007. In late 2009, the family bought Matakauri Lodge in Queenstown, which reopened after renovation in 2010; since 2023, the three lodges have been managed by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

In November 2009, Robertson won a tax case involving about $27 million: he submitted phone records, calendars, bank statements, and other records to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to prove he had spent only 183 days in New York City in 2000, and therefore was not a full-year resident subject to New York City resident tax.⁠[8][8]

On July 26, 2010, Robertson wrote a letter to his family explaining how he wished to be remembered. In it, he reviewed his work with the Boys’ Club of New York and his role as board chairman of the Cancer Research Institute, and described how Fred Krupp encouraged his interest in environmental issues and how they worked together on lobbying that helped pass a strict California auto emissions bill, which he said later became the model for the national standard. In the same year, Josephine Tucker Robertson, his wife of 38 years, died.⁠[4][3][3][3][3][3][1]

In 2016, Robertson took part in an A$39.5 million funding round of the New Zealand admissions consulting company Crimson Education. Crimson co-founder Jamie Beaton had worked with Robertson as a financial analyst while studying at Harvard; in December 2019, Robertson said through his spokesman Fraser Seitel that he had been and remained a great fan of Beaton.⁠[9][10][10]

Robertson died on August 23, 2022, at the age of 90; his death was confirmed by his longtime spokesman, Fraser Seitel.⁠[4][1]

Robertson provided seed capital to dozens of protégé analysts and portfolio managers, known as the “Tiger Cubs,” including Philippe Laffont of Coatue, Chase Coleman of Tiger Global, Lee Ainslie of Maverick, John Griffin of Blue Ridge Capital, and Steve Mandel of Lone Pine. After closing his fund in 2000, he continued to manage his own money and invested in several funds founded by his protégés. Robertson said that what mattered most in choosing hedge fund managers was that they were smart and honest, followed by competitiveness.⁠[1][1][2][1]

Robertson gave away a total of $1.3 billion to causes including medical research, charter schools, and environmental protection; he and his wife Josie were also leading supporters of the Central Park Conservancy and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.⁠[2][1]

The Robertsons assembled a large collection of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, part of which they donated to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Auckland Art Gallery; the Robertson Foundation inherited more than two dozen works from his estate and has arranged for them to travel. Fourteen works of the European avant-garde from the collection are on view at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin from September 27, 2026, to August 5, 2029.⁠[4][4][4][11][11]