Like the delightful Marie Kondo, I love mess. Especially if it’s someone else’s.
Copeland tells the origin story of Ray Dalio, hedge fund phenomenon turned self-help guru. Though an indifferent student in school, Dalio was locked in at his gig as a caddy for the wealthy where he made the connections that led to the establishment of Bridgewater Associates.
At first, Dalio obsesses over building a kind of Grand Unified Theory for investing that accounts for the vagaries of geopolitics. Once he has successfully codified his investment philosophy, he shifts his attention to doing the same for one’s professional and personal lives. And that’s when things quickly go off the rails. Like, Stanford Prison Experiment off the rails.
Dalio fixates on radical honesty and free inquiry as the means by which one will achieve… enlightenment. No lie or half-truth is too small not to be explored and rooted out in this grand meritocracy of ideas. Bridgewater employees find themselves being quizzed on Dalio’s philosophy (and re-educated if they fail) and quoting from it as scripture.
There is a “trial” over the authorship of an email that lasts nine months (prosecuted by James Comey, begging the question of whether Dalio or Trump is the most unreasonable person he’s worked with). Superstar thinkers are brought in to execute vanity projects and then hamstrung. Honestly, the drama is too much: you can only hear the story of falling out of Dalio’s favor so many times before you lose empathy for the former employees.
That’s my primary criticism of the book. It feels like wacky story after wacky story, with people dipping in and out. It’s hard to get a sense of narrative flow. I would think a person had ended their Bridgewater journey only for them to re-emerge–“they still work here?”–in a later chapter.
Copeland’s story largely focuses on the non-investment side of Bridgewater Associates. The investment operation is a black box, for reasons that don’t become clear until the very end of the book. This made it feel particularly chaotic because it’s not clear what the non-revenue side does outside of watching footage of colleagues being corrected.
The Fund reminded me so much of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood. Wild workplace drama is my glory.
