Louis Bacon

Louis Moore Bacon was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father founded the real estate company Bacon & Co. He attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and Middlebury College in Vermont, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in American literature; during several college summers he worked as a clerk at the New York Stock Exchange specialist firm Walter N. Frank & Co., which sparked his interest in trading.⁠[1][1][1][2][1]

He then studied for an MBA in finance at Columbia Business School, graduating in 1981; while at Columbia he traded commodity futures with money from a low-interest loan, losing money for his first three terms before turning a profit in his fourth semester.⁠[2][1][1][1]

In 1981, Bacon entered the sales and trading training program at Bankers Trust; a year later he returned to Walter N. Frank & Co., where he learned currency trading, and then became a futures broker at Shearson Lehman Brothers, eventually rising to senior vice president for futures. In 1985 he first managed money for Commodities Corp., lost a third of the $100,000 principal, and insisted on returning the balance.⁠[1][1][1][2][3][3]

In 1987, while still at Shearson, Bacon set up Remington Trading Partners and profited from that year’s stock market crash.⁠[1]

Bacon founded the private investment management firm Moore Capital Management in March 1989, naming it after his mother’s maiden name. In 1990 he began trading his first fund, Moore Global Investments, which rose 86% in its first year on his calls on the Gulf War’s impact on oil prices and a short position in the Nikkei. According to the firm, the offshore flagship fund returned 24% a year net of fees from its 1990 inception through 2004.⁠[2][3][1][1][3]

In 1992, Bacon founded The Moore Charitable Foundation, a family foundation that supports nonprofits protecting land, water, and wildlife habitat, and he serves as its founder and chairman; its affiliates include The Trinchera Blanca Foundation, The Taos Ski Valley Foundation, The Robins Island Foundation, The Orton Foundation, and The Moore Bahamas Foundation, among others.⁠[2][2]

In 1993, Bacon bought Robins Island in Long Island’s Peconic Bay for $11 million. That year his fund rose 50% and made its first cash distribution of $470 million; in 1994, amid sharply rising interest rates and the collapse of the German bond market, it lost about 14% and he lost 90% of his client base, before rebounding with a 25% gain the following year.⁠[1][1][1][3][3]

In 1999, Bacon was instrumental in founding the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to clean water that grew to represent more than 300 local environmental organizations in over 40 countries. He was also the lead investor in the timberland investment manager The Forestland Group, which that year acquired about 110,000 acres of Adirondack State Park forestland.⁠[4][4][4][4]

By late 2004, Moore Capital managed about $7 billion from New York and London, a substantial part of it Bacon’s own money; known as a global macro trader, he was seen as belonging to the same genre as George SorosGeorge SorosGeorge Soros is an American investor and philanthropist, the founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Foundations. He is known for macro trading and for shorting the British pound in 1992, is also a major political donor on the side of the U.S. Democratic Party, and has long been at the center of political controversy and conspiracy theories.Open the full entry and Paul Tudor Jones. Moore Capital had two losing years, in 1994 and in 2002, the latter caused by the Enron-led turmoil in corporate credit markets.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

In 2007, Bacon bought the roughly 172,000-acre Trinchera Ranch in Colorado from Malcolm Forbes’s family for $175 million, at the time the most expensive American residence ever sold.⁠[5]

Bacon and the Canadian fashion executive Peter Nygard were neighbors in Lyford Cay on New Providence in the Bahamas, and their dispute, which began in 2007 over runoff, had by 2015 escalated into at least 16 legal actions between the two men and their associates. Bacon sued Nygard and obtained a court injunction requiring removal of an encroachment, and later installed industrial-grade speakers at the edge of his property aimed at Nygard’s home; in the summer of 2010, 11 armed Bahamian police officers raided Bacon’s house and confiscated the speakers. Nygard asserted in the litigation that his most damaging accusers had been paid off by Bacon, which Bacon called baseless.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued an order simultaneously filing and settling charges that Moore Capital Management, LP, Moore Capital Advisors, LLC, and the Bahamian entity Moore Advisors, Ltd. had attempted to manipulate the settlement prices of platinum and palladium futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The CFTC found that a former portfolio manager had, from November 2007 to May 2008, placed orders in a practice known as “banging the close” to push settlement prices up, and that Moore Capital Management had failed to diligently supervise his trading.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

The three entities were ordered to pay, jointly and severally, a $25 million civil monetary penalty; their registrations as commodity pool operators or commodity trading advisors were restricted for three years, they were barred for two years from trading in the 15 minutes before and during the close of those markets, and they had to record and review trade-related communications. The order recognized Moore Capital’s cooperation during the investigation.⁠[6][6][6][6]

Bacon was granted permission by Mr Justice Tugendhat of the High Court in London to use a UK court order requiring the U.S. publishers of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Denver Post, and the blogging platform WordPress to disclose the identities of anonymous commenters alleged to have defamed him on their websites, so that he could bring defamation proceedings.⁠[7][7][7][7]

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that Bacon intended to donate a conservation easement of about 90,000 acres on his Blanca Ranch in Colorado as the foundation for the proposed Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area; Salazar said it was the largest single conservation easement ever donated to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Bacon said the move would protect all 172,000 acres of the ranch.⁠[8][8][8][8]

Bacon ultimately donated a conservation easement of about 167,000 acres on the Trinchera Blanca Ranch to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the largest donation the agency had ever received, which was critical to establishing the 558th unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System; combined with easements he authorized on the Tercio and Red River ranches, nearly 800,000 acres of protected private and public land are now connected from Great Sand Dunes National Park to northern New Mexico.⁠[4][4][4]

In January 2015, Bacon filed a $100 million defamation suit against Nygard in New York, alleging that Nygard was the ringleader of a multimedia smear campaign—including purchased TV and radio ads, websites, doctored videos, and rallies in Nassau—that labeled Bacon a racist, a thief, and a “terrorist.”⁠[5][5][5]

On December 22, 2025, New York Supreme Court Justice Richard Latin granted Bacon’s motion for summary judgment, writing that Nygard had admitted in his deposition that he could not provide evidence to support the allegedly defamatory statements; Nygard’s lawyer said he expected to appeal.⁠[9][9][9][9]

The British government announced a marine reserve nearly the size of the UK in the waters of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, supported by a £300,000 grant from the charitable Bacon Foundation to close about half of the waters to fishing, police a tuna fishery to international standards in the other half, and set the reserve’s final boundaries.⁠[10][10]

That year, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership gave Bacon its 2016 Lifetime Conservation Achievement Award, recognizing his authorization of conservation easements on more than 210,600 acres across the United States.⁠[11][11]

After Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas, Bacon, as founder of The Moore Bahamas Foundation, pledged $1 million for short-term relief and long-term reconstruction.⁠[12]

Block.one announced the formation of its subsidiary Bullish Global to prepare the launch of the Bullish cryptocurrency exchange; after Block.one injected $100 million in cash, 164,000 BTC, and 20 million EOS and a $300 million strategic investment round was completed, it was capitalized with more than $10 billion, and Bacon was among the investors leading the round alongside Thiel CapitalThiel CapitalThiel Capital is an American investment firm founded by Peter Thiel in 2011 that provides strategic and operational support for his investment initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures; Founders Fund, Mithril, Valar Ventures, the Thiel Fellowship, and Breakout Labs were all incubated by the firm or its predecessors. It also invests in startups in its own name, partnered with Pacific Century to sponsor the Bridgetown series of special purpose acquisition companies, and took part in Bullish’s strategic funding round in 2021.Open the full entry, Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, Alan HowardAlan HowardAlan Howard is a British macro hedge fund manager who in 2002 co-founded Brevan Howard with fellow traders from Credit Suisse First Boston and built it into one of Europe’s largest hedge fund managers. After stepping down as chief executive in 2019, he focused on his own trading, and in 2021 he took part in Bullish’s strategic funding round and became a senior advisor to the company.Open the full entry, Richard LiRichard LiRichard Li (Li Tzar Kai) is a Hong Kong entrepreneur and investor. He founded the pan-Asian satellite television network Star TV in the early 1990s and, after selling a controlling stake to News Corporation in 1993, founded the private investment group Pacific Century Group (PCG). He has been chairman of PCCW since 1999 and is executive chairman of HKT; the insurer FWD, which he founded in 2013, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2025.Open the full entry, Christian AngermayerChristian AngermayerChristian Angermayer is a German entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Apeiron Investment Group, a private investment firm and family office. He co-founded the RNA interference company Ribopharma in 2000 and, in 2018, co-founded atai Life Sciences, a biotechnology company developing mental health treatments including psychedelic compounds (AtaiBeckley after its 2025 combination with Beckley Psytech), where he is chairman of the board; he is also co-founder and chairman of the board of Enhanced, a sports competition and wellness company.Open the full entry, Galaxy DigitalGalaxy DigitalGalaxy Digital (Galaxy Digital Inc., Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange: GLXY) is a New York-based digital asset financial services and data center infrastructure company founded by Mike Novogratz, which says it was founded in 2018. It provides institutional clients with digital asset trading, lending, investment banking, asset management, staking, and custody technology services, and is building data centers in Texas for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.Open the full entry, and Nomura. Bacon said the cryptocurrency market continued to benefit from institutional adoption and that Bullish was well positioned to use blockchain-based market structures to further improve access for institutional and retail investors.⁠[13][13][13]

In July that year, Bullish announced plans to go public through a merger with the special purpose acquisition company Far Peak, and the press release again listed Louis Bacon among its investors.⁠[14][14]

On May 1, 2025, Bacon published an op-ed in the UK’s Daily Mail denouncing Drax, the country’s largest power station. The same month, Trout Unlimited announced that Bacon and his Trinchera Ranch had won the 2025 Western Division American Fisheries Society Conservation Achievement Award for more than a decade of work restoring native trout such as the Rio Grande cutthroat trout.⁠[15][16][16][16]

As of October 2026, Bacon is the founder, chairman, and principal investment manager of Moore Capital Management, which is headquartered in New York with offices in London and Hong Kong and invests in global financial markets, real estate, private lending, and private equity. He also serves on the Columbia Business School Board, the board of directors of the Foreign Policy Association, the Leadership Council of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Corporate Fund Board of the Kennedy Center, and is a trustee of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team Foundation.⁠[2][2][4][2][2][2]

His conservation honors include the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Lifetime Conservation Achievement Award, the Audubon Medal, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Chairman’s Leadership Award, and the Land Trust Alliance President’s Award.⁠[2]

Personal website: https://louisbacon.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Moore Capital Management: Official website: https://www.moorecap.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

The Moore Charitable Foundation: Official website: https://www.moorecharitable.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]