Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was born on September 12, 1960, in Amioun, Lebanon. His father, Nagib Taleb, was an oncologist and haematologist, and his mother, Minerva Ghosn, was an anthropology researcher.⁠[1]

He attended the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut. He recalled that from around the age of thirteen he kept a log of the hours he read, aiming for sixty hours a week. After the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, the school, near the Green Line dividing Beirut, was badly damaged, and his family lost much of its wealth and political influence.⁠[1]

Taleb has written that he avoids the label “Lebanese,” “preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.”⁠[1]

After graduating from the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais, Taleb went to Paris for university, earning a Bachelor of Science with honours and a Master of Science.⁠[1]

At nineteen he went to the United States to study for an MBA at the Wharton SchoolWharton SchoolThe Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. Established through Joseph Wharton’s gift in 1881, it offers undergraduate, MBA, doctoral and executive education.Open the full entry of the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry, graduating in 1983. He recalled that at Wharton “I discovered that I wanted to specialise in a profession linked to probability and rare events.”⁠[1]

From December 1984 to January 2005 Taleb worked as a derivatives trader, specializing in hedging nonlinear risks and managing payoffs under complicated probability distributions. He held positions at Bankers Trust, UBSUBSUBS is a global financial group headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, operating wealth management, Swiss personal and corporate banking, asset management and investment banking. Its modern bank emerged from a 1998 merger, its holding company was incorporated in 2014, and it acquired Credit Suisse in 2023.Open the full entry, CS First Boston, Indosuez and BNP-Paribas, was a floor trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and ran his own derivatives firm for six years.⁠[2]

In his CV he states that he spent 21 years as a derivatives trader and, after closing 650,000 option transactions and examining 200,000 risk reports, changed careers in 2006–2010 to become a scholar, mathematical researcher and philosophical essayist.⁠[3]

In 1997 John Wiley published Taleb’s technical book Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options. To write it he stepped away from trading for a few years, recalling: “I quietly deposited my necktie in the trash can at the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Park Avenue.”⁠[3][1]

In 1998 he received a doctorate from the University of Paris (Dauphine) with the thesis The Microstructure of Dynamic Hedging, advised by Hélyette Geman and examined by a committee including Dilip Madan, Nicole El Karoui, Michel Lasry and Marco Avellaneda.⁠[1]

In 1999 Taleb founded Empirica Capital LLC, which ran a tail hedging program until 2005.⁠[3]

From December 1999 to December 2005 he was a Fellow of the Mathematics in Finance Program and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; from January 2005 to January 2006 he was also Dean’s Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.⁠[2]

In 2001 Taleb published Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, with a second edition in 2005. The book later became part of his multivolume essay series, the Incerto.⁠[1][3]

On April 17, 2007, Random House published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The book defines a black swan as a highly improbable event with three characteristics: it is unpredictable, it carries a massive impact, and after the fact people concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was.⁠[4]

In the publisher’s author Q&A, Taleb said such events are considered close to impossible before they happen and predictable afterward: “They are rare, but their impact is monstrous.”⁠[4]

The same year, Mark Spitznagel founded Universa Investments, an investment management firm specializing in risk mitigation, with Taleb as scientific advisor; his title at the firm is “Distinguished Scientist.”⁠[5][3]

From December 2007 to January 2009 he was a Visiting Research Professor at London Business School.⁠[2]

In 2008 Taleb became Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. On September 17 of that year, Judge Mary Ellen Coster Williams of the United States Court of Federal Claims admitted him as an expert in risk management and derivatives.⁠[3]

From 2009 to 2013 Taleb was a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Said Business School BTThe Business TimesThe Business Times is a Singapore English-language financial daily founded in 1976 and now published by the not-for-profit SPH Media Trust.Open the full entry Centre, University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

On April 7, 2009, Taleb published “Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world” on FT.com in response to the financial crisis. The first principle read “What is fragile should break early while it is still small,” and the second “No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.”⁠[6]

On September 10, 2009, Taleb, identified as Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and a principal of Universa Investments, testified at a hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight on Value-at-Risk (VaR) models. He said: “I have been since begging for suspension of these measurements of tail risks. We just don't understand tail events.”⁠[7]

In July 2011 he testified again before a congressional subcommittee, on risk management.⁠[3]

In 2010 Taleb published the aphorism collection The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms and a second edition of The Black Swan with a new essay, “On Robustness and Fragility.”⁠[8][4]

From January 2010 his involvement with Universa Investments became entirely passive.⁠[3]

On November 27, 2012, Random House published Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. The book introduces the concept of the antifragile: the resilient resists shocks and stays the same, while the antifragile gets better and better.⁠[9][3]

On October 2, 2015, Taleb and others formed the Real World Risk Institute in the New York area, offering a “Mini-Certificate” on decision-making under uncertainty; its mission includes “Understand model error before you use a model.”⁠[10][11]

On February 27, 2018, Random House published Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, the fifth volume of the Incerto. The book argues that the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints and flourishing people, and that one should not profit without owning one’s own risk and paying for one’s own losses.⁠[12][11]

Taleb wrote on his website that the book was not submitted to any reviewer, had no U.S. book tour, promotion or advance copies, only a single lecture in New York City, and opened at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.⁠[11]

The same year he wrote the foreword to Saifedean AmmousSaifedean AmmousSaifedean Ammous is a Palestinian-born Austrian-school economist and author who taught economics at the Lebanese American University from 2009 to 2019. He is best known for his 2018 Bitcoin book The Bitcoin Standard and hosts The Bitcoin Standard Podcast.Open the full entry’s book The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, which reads: “BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users.”⁠[13]

In 2020 STEM Academic Press published Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications, the first volume of the “Technical Incerto,” which expresses the ideas of the Incerto mathematically; the electronic version is freely available on arXiv. The same year he and Pasquale Cirillo published “Tail risk of Contagious Diseases” in Nature Physics.⁠[3][11]

On June 27, 2021, Taleb posted the paper “Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility” on arXiv; it was later accepted by Quantitative Finance. The paper argues that bitcoin in its current version “failed to satisfy the notion of "currency without government",” can be neither a short- nor long-term store of value, with an expected value “no higher than $0,” and cannot operate as a reliable inflation hedge.⁠[14]

Taleb retired from his post as Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University in 2022, and is currently affiliated with the American University of Beirut.⁠[3]

The Incerto is Taleb’s multivolume philosophical and practical essay on uncertainty, comprising Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile and Skin in the Game, in nonoverlapping volumes that can be read in any order. He describes it as an investigation of “opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world.”⁠[11]

His CV notes that all of his academic publications must serve as backups to points made philosophically in the Incerto, or to related applications.⁠[3]

Taleb has been a scientific advisor to the International Monetary FundInternational Monetary FundThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international financial institution conceived at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, whose Articles entered into force in 1945 and which began operations on March 1, 1947; headquartered in Washington, it has 191 member countries and has been led by Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva since October 2019.Open the full entry on the risk of tail events, was faculty at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009, and has advised central banks.⁠[3]

He has stopped accepting awards, honorary doctorates and listings; his official biography states that he refuses all honors and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport.”⁠[3][15]

Taleb’s interests include philology (ancient languages), history and recreational mathematics. He speaks French, English and Levantine Arabic, converses in Spanish, Italian and Greek, and reads Ancient Greek, Classical Arabic, Latin, Aramaic/Syriac and Hebrew.⁠[3]

Personal website: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/nntaleb (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uY6yLP9BS4BUc9BSc0Jww (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Universa Investments: Official website: https://www.universa.net/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Real World Risk Institute: Official website: https://realworldrisk.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]