Updated: 12/31/2014 01:43 PM EST. It became one of the biggest science stories of the year. What do we actually know?. The skeletal software behind the data-sharing project became a slick cloud-based platform, which has now been used by more than 30,000 researchers. Several other Houston area billionaires made their money during a record year for oil and gas, such as George Bishop, who. Centaurus Advisors, which posted eye-popping returns and led him to become the youngest billionaire in the US in 2007. George Soros, Soros Fund Management - $1.1 billion. On the contrary, Arnold says he believes that most researchers go into their work with the best of intentions, only to be led astray by a system that rewards the wrong behaviors. As a pipeline company, Enron had a direct view onto many of the factors that influence gas prices. McGoverns quip about Enron, a company that hasnt existed in 15 years, was a bit of a potshot. Says Goodman, Scientists really do want to discover things that make a difference in peoples lives. In 2008, the young trader is among the top three traders who earned the most money, his salary amounted to $ 1.5 billion. John Arnold's tweet, "A new study shows " are "the four most dangerous words," is a perfect crystallization of the philanthropist's skeptical attitude toward a lot of scientific research. John Arnold. That's the true story of former star Enron trader John Arnold, who most recently worked as a hedge fund manager. Founded in 1992, Centaurus was formed with a singular focus - to provide unparalleled service, support, technology, and education to independent financial advisers in the securities industry. All told, the foundations Research Integrity initiative has given more than $80 million to science critics and reformers in the past five years alone. Arnold and his wife, Laura Munoz, together run the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, a major private grantmaking foundation.In early 2019 he and his wife Laura started Arnold Ventures, a for-profit limited liability company (LLC) and grantmaking organization. Billionaire John Arnold pushes for charity reform. We support the principles of individual liberty, a free market economy and limited constitutional government: These are the cornerstones of American society. These critiques of science amounted to a deep philosophical quandary for the Arnolds, philanthropists who had dedicated their lives to a data-based approach to giving. En 2002, us su bonificacin para financiar Centaurus . Were looking to create an organization of thoughtful failure and fantastic success., Arnold is, in at least one respect, trying to make science a little more like finance. A 2017 interview with Wired magazine characterized him this way: Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researchers work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. But what ought to concern conservatives isnt so much the Arnolds giving as how they give. [28] From 2010-2013, the Arnolds were heavily involved in the Innocence Project which led to their interest in criminal reform. But when I visit the Arnold Foundations Houston headquarters in June, Laura has been called away on a family emergency, leaving John to do the talking. Fix terrible science. No. His mother was an accountant (she would later help manage the books at his hedge fund). All rights reserved. It was the largest cash bonus ever distributed by the company. Laura and John Arnold have a net. Laura and John Arnold, co-founders and co-chairs of Arnold Ventures. In 2015, after a cancer researcher was found to have falsified research data and defrauded the government out of millions of dollars, Arnold complained on Twitter that the penalty, a five-year funding restriction, was too light. Constitutionalists would add that the entire relationship is hedged in by the First Amendments guarantee of free speech, lest disclosure rules encompass an individuals right to support lawful causes of their choosing without facing public backlash for holding unpopular opinions. Arnold was not criminally charged with any wrongdoing at Enron, but he was named in a bankruptcy lawsuit by other Enron staff. Arnold, 46, was raised in a middle-class family and worked her way through Harvard, she wrote in a July 2010 letter announcing her decision to sign The Giving Pledge. [3] [8] At 14, he started his first company selling collectible sports cards called Blue Chip Cards. Republished But powerful special interests are trying to question science., If John Arnold decided he wanted to beat hunger, I wouldnt want to bet on hunger.. Of course, this new LLC model comes with the cost of losing the Arnold Foundations tax exemption. Far from arbitrary, this body of regulationwhich Schambra is certainly right to call annoyingcodifies a common understanding between Americans and their government: Philanthropy is crucial for a healthy civil society. Arnold is a board member of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. By the following year, Nosek was cofounding an institution called the Center for Open Science with an initial $5.25 million grant from the Arnold Foundation. As Enron neared bankruptcy, executives scrambled to hold its operation together, offering bonuses to keep traders on board. Let us know if we're missing any workplace or industry recognition - Add Awards. But given the long history of deep-pocketed business interests sowing doubt in research, his underlying question was a fair one: Who is John Arnold, and why is he spending so much money to raise questions about science? Arnold founded Centaurus with an $8 million employee bonus from Enron. A number of the Arnolds reform efforts have focused on fixing nutrition science. Why he started his own firm energy trading firm, Centaurus Advisors, and why he ultimately hung it up as a trader to focus all of his energy on philanthropy. The incentives to produce positive results were so great, Nosek and others worried, that some scientists were simply locking their inconvenient data away. It Depends On Who You Talk To", "How we Ranked Forbes 400 based on their giving", "Dog The Bounty Hunter Joins Lawsuit Against Chris Christie Over Bail Reform", "June Rodgers v. Christopher Christie, No. Arnold funds Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), a nonprofit that created a formula to price drugs. The United States is almost alone worldwide in granting tax deductions for charitable donations (Sweden also enacted such a policy in 2019), which were established with the Revenue Act of 1917. In recent decades, math and science whizzes like Arnold have invaded Wall Street, bringing a level of scientific precision to trading and often making fortunes in the process. The Arnold Foundation has been the Medici of meta-research, Ioannidis says. NET WORTH: $3.3 billion . British doctor Ben Goldacre also got an email from the Arnold Foundation in 2013. We asked ourselves, What is the point of having two separate entities? Arnold is careful not to lump all researchers together when he talks about the problems in science. And for two years they had been rejected again and againwhich was, by 2011, discouraging but not all that surprising to the 38-year-old scientist. At its peak Centaurus managed some $6 billion before Arnold closed the fund and retired in 2012 at the age of 38, establishing the Laura and John Arnold Foundation with his wifea former oil executivesoon after. [emphasis added]. Consent . are the four most dangerous words, Arnold wrote on Twitter. Given our enormous appetite for policy change, and given the fact that we thankfully are not constrained by one structure, we dont have resources channeled only to the C3. The Center for Open Science's replication efforts have inspired economists and even tropical ecologists to plan reproducibility projects of their own. A Google search told him that the Arnolds were a young billionaire couple in Houston. Media reports have declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. But he tells me that listening to Taubes and reading his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, had been an aha moment for him. But as many Wall Street veterans can testify, betting against John Arnold is usually a bad idea. Because investigating and replicating research begins with having the data and materials necessary to do so, he is particularly focused on making science more transparent. And Noseks project was an attempt to head it off at the pass. Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold committed Monday, April 5, 2021, to donate 5% of their wealth annually as part of an effort to . On a warm October day in 2014, envoys from 15 of America's wealthiest families gathered at Circle T, Ross Perot Jr .'s 2,500-acre ranch outside . Much of the Arnolds philanthropy has funded causes favored by the Left, such as ranked-choice voting, litigation against supposed Republican gerrymandering in congressional maps, and the eco-Right, groups infiltrating the conservative movement with a left-wing global-warming agenda. Science is built like a building, Arnold says. Sign in to get the best natural gas news and data. [10] Using their new Internet-based trading network, EnronOnline,[citation needed] [11] he is credited with making three quarters of a billion dollars for Enron in 2001 and was rewarded with the largest bonus in Enron history, some $8 million. It became extraordinarily frustrating.. John Arnold is Founder and Co-Chair of Arnold Ventures. [43], John received an $8 million dollar bonus from Enron just before the company filed for bankruptcy. Laura and John Arnold, Houston $285 million. He reportedly earned the company $750 million the year Enron collapsed. Researchers say viruses can kill antibiotic-resistant microbes and help treat infections. . CRC respects confidentiality and will not share your e-mail address. In 2018, he jokingly complained that hes been called the next Koch brother by the far left press and the next George Soros by the far right.. But some experts are critical of this shift away from traditional giving, seeing in it a worrying trend in modern philanthropy. Laura Arnold, 43, and John Arnold, 42 Co-founders of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation The Houston couple with three children work full time to give away John's $2.8 billion fortune. [1] Arnold figures that some of his specific grants might not work out as planned. The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. Copyright2023Capital Research Center. What makes this even more special is that John rarely gives interviews or does podcasts. ), The backlash against Teicholz also furnished one of the few occasions when anyone has raised an eyebrow at the Arnolds funding of science critics. The aim was to redo about 50 studies from three prominent psychology journals, to establish an estimate of how often modern psychology turns up false positive results. John Arnold has criticized labor unions, college tuition schedules, and the New York Timess increasing contempt for free speech. Worse yet, whenever evidence came along that contradicted the consensus about the dangers of eating fatoften evidence that was much stronger than the evidence for the dangersit was ignored or not even published. The extent of that individuals ability to freely support causes may be magnified by using an LLC instead of a nonprofit, but it also further blurs the already faded line between philanthropy and politics. The Center for Open Sciences next big undertaking is another reproducibility projectthis one for cancer studieswhich recently revealed its initial findings (two of five studies yielded the same results the second time around). [1], A 1995 graduate of Vanderbilt University, he completed a degree in mathematics and economics in three years. It wasnt long before Arnold had the answer to his doubts. The development of regulation around the philanthropic sector throughout the 20th century may have formed the modern nonprofit organization, but it only codified what had been thriving in America since before the American Revolution. They are on record as agreeing with some of the critiques and focus on partnering with organizations to maximize their impact without undue influence. In 2011 Centaurus Energy Master Fund LP was fined $75,000 by the New York Mercantile Exchange for violating position limits in natural gas trading (see Daily GPI, Dec. 28, 2011). [46] Through his foundation, Arnold has aggressively promoted pension reform in the state of California based on a study his foundation conducted with Pew that failed to mention that Enron or the overall financial crisis contributed to the shortfall. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The Supreme Court has come under intense scrutiny lately over a series of reports suggesting potential conflicts of interest. At the Center for Open Science, Nosek has already begun to experiment with new incentives for scientists. John Arnold, then head of the hedge fund Centaurus Advisors, testifies before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington, August 5, 2009. [50] She was formerly a mergers-and acquisitions attorney in Houston, Texas, and an oil company executive. Yet the foundation is also focused on reforming what the Arnolds see as a broken public pension systema project that, in practice, usually means cutting payments to retirees, raising retirement ages, and switching new workers to 401(k)-style plans. The centers replication efforts, in turn, have inspired economists and even tropical ecologists to plan reproducibility projects of their own. John Arnold President Houston, Texas, United States 12 followers Join to view profile Centaurus Capital Experience President - President Centaurus Capital View John's full profile See who. Subscribe now. Those were the early days of the internet, and he managed to gain access to an online bulletin board intended only for card dealers. Qu u c Centaurus Energy ca Arnold, hin ang qun l hn 5 t USD gi tr ti sn, cha bao gi kim c li nhun t hn 50% . A lot of people didnt know it was out there, Arnold says. The preceding news reportmay not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in anyform, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc. 2023 Natural Gas Intelligence. In 2012, after growing his firm, Centaurus Advisors, from an initial $8 million to $5 billion in less than a decade, he announced that he was walking away to pursue other interests. Media reports declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. At the time, his net worth was estimated to be around $3 billion. We are able to use resources in another structure. Like Tom Steyer, George Soros, and a number of other mega-donors on the Left, John Arnold earned his vast wealth as a hedge fund investor. But figuring out which organizations were most effective turned out to be vexing. Capital Research Center (CRC) was established in 1984 to promote a better understanding of charity and philanthropy. At age 38, Texas billionaire John Arnold decided to step away from high finance. Centaurus will be returning capital to investors, according to a Reuters report. According to Forbes, Arnold has a personal fortune of $3 billion as of March, putting him at No. His estimated net worth is $3.3 billion as of writing. A year ago, talk in the Texas energy hub was mostly about defending oil and gas and denouncing renewables, Arnold, 47, said Monday on his Twitter account. View Subscription Options The legal reporting required for these categories, as annoying as it is, is how our democracy ensures that giving and political activity remain visible and accountable to the public. At its peak Centaurus managed some $6 billion before Arnold closed the fund and retired in 2012 at the age of 38, establishing the Laura and John Arnold Foundation with his wifea former oil executivesoon after. Houstonian John Arnold is the founder of Centaurus Capital LP, an energy-focused, family office investment fund. Projects that Nosek had once envisioned as modest efforts carried out in his lab were now being conducted on an entirely different scale at the centers startup-like offices in downtown Charlottesville, with some 70 employees and interns churning out code and poring over research. Insofar as the LLC form allows donors to treat the categories as just so many rooms for a tiresome accounting game of hide-and-seekthe view that Arnold seems to take herewe may come to regret the growing popularity of that form among those with the largest appetites for change. [25][1] The organization was founded in 2010. John Arnold managed to walk away from Enrons 2001 collapse with a seven-figure bonus and no accusations of wrongdoing attached to his name. She joins other singers on an Olivia Newton John duets album out this week. But he should loom larger on the conservative radar considering that the two nonprofits associated with this billionaire couple poured out nearly $1 billion in grants between 2008 and 2018. Centaurus Capital LP has committed around $500 million in equity for EOC Partners, according to the . In 2016, John Arnold gave $250,000 to an unsuccessful effort to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts, and they poured more than $500,000 into a PAC that helped bolster Governor Charlie . Guest: John Arnold is an American philanthropist and founder of Arnold Ventures. Arnold was raised in Dallas, Texas, and he was the younger of two sons. Washington DC | New York | Houston | Pittsburgh | Mexico City Calgary | Chile. Whether all this momentum will lead to transformational change decades from now is impossible to know. But about an hour in, Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern leaned into his microphone. WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. Form While. Background. Arnold Ventures' John Arnold: Now is the Time to Reform Charitable Giving Laws. And though the fund bounced back the next year, tighter regulations on trading and a far less volatile marketthanks to a growing supply of natural gas from shale rockmade it unlikely that Arnold would again see the astonishing returns of only a few years earlier. . The problem even had a name: the file drawer effect. Centaurus Advisors. However, after 17 years as an energy trader, I feel that its time to pursue other interests, Arnold wrote to investors in a letter obtained by NGI. The No. But as it happens, Nosek is just one of many researchers who have received unsolicited emails from the Arnold Foundation in the past few yearsresearchers involved in similar rounds of soul-searching and critique in their own fields, who have loosely amounted to a movement to fix science. [17] August 2008, Centaurus acquired around 10% of the shares of National Coal Corporation (NCOC). His mother later would work as an accountant at Centaurus. John Arnold is Founder and Co-Chair of Arnold Ventures. On the morning of October 7, 2015, the US House Agriculture Committee convened a hearing on the controversy surrounding the dietary guidelines, fueled by the BMJ article. Credit: Arnold Ventures. 2023 Cond Nast. But among hedge funders and energy traders, Arnold is a legend. But as a practical matter, we grew to be so large in terms of our appetite for change in our policy areas that it just became cumbersome to have a C3 group on one side and a C4 group on the other side and having them not really be able to talk to each other. NGI Archives The Centaurus founder could probably point to trades that made him a ton of money but you really can't put a price on avoiding the humiliation that would've come from . Now, much of the discussion has shifted . [33] But Shankman recognized that he and Arnold were different in one key respect: Arnold had a greater appetite for risk, a quality that seemed at odds with his quiet demeanor. He started Centaurus the next year, bringing along a small group of former Enron traders, who worked out of a single large room. Arnold Ventures is a group of more than 100 passionate people from all walks of life who feel a deep urgency to help people in need. He questioned everything, Fleisher says. [44][45], Arnold has been accused of pushing for pension reform in response to a lawsuit the California state pension system, CalPERS, filed against Enron. Science Has Its Problems, But the Web Could Be the Fix, Psychology Is in Crisis Over Whether Its in Crisis, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. NatGas Conference Call Schedule, This article is part of NGI's Daily Gas Price Index. He also created Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic investment firm focused on health . FILE - In this Aug. 5, 2009, file photo, John Arnold, then head of the hedge fund Centaurus Advisors of Houston, testifies before the The Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington,. Arnold has said that the first phase of his life was 100 percent trying to make money and that its now 100 percent trying to do good. As The Wall Street Journal noted, in US history, there may have never been a self-made individual with so much money who devoted himself to philanthropy at such a young age.. When Mr. Arnold, 31, created Centaurus in 2002 with $8 million of his own money, the energy trading industry was on its knees, incapacitated by the fraud and irrational exuberance at Enron.. Hayek, Deirdre McCloskey, Elinor Ostrom, Walter Williams, or some of the other economists Ive profiled. From its ashes, Arnold built his own hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California,. The guest that day was science journalist Gary Taubes, and he was talking about how the prevailing dietary wisdom of the past 40 yearsthat eating too much fat leads to obesity and heart diseasearose from the flimsiest of scientific evidence. Michael and Susan Dell, Austin $1 billion. The comedian John Oliver spent 20 prime-time minutes on HBO last May mocking the reign of terrible science on TV news shows and in public debate: After a certain point, all that ridiculous information can make you wonder: Is science bullshit? In 2012 the former head of cancer research at the biotech firm Amgen revealed the results of the companys effort to replicate 53 landmark papers in hematology and oncology; only six studies findings could be confirmed. Gregg Fleisher, who taught him calculus in high school, recalls an occasion when Arnold instantly solved a math puzzle that had been known to stump PhDs. The listings let him see that the same cards were sold at different prices in different parts of the countrywhich presented an opportunity for arbitrage. Featured groups, golf odds, expert picks plus matchups and props with information you can bet on. And good traders, as Arnold sees it, naturally come to appreciate something that researchers too often miss: Its very easy to be fooled by your own data. Centaurus Energy Master Fund LP, a Houston-based energy hedge fund that was founded by John D. Arnold after the collapse of Enron Corp., was fined $75,000 by the New York Mercantile Exchange . That's what the Arnold Foundation did last week, when it announced that it would be combining its philanthropy and political giving under Arnold Ventures. A former executive at Salomon Brothers later told The New York Times that there were very few incidents in the history of Wall Street comparable to Arnolds success that year. [3][8] His father was a lawyer and died when Arnold was 18. By kindergarten, Arnolds talent for math was apparent. John D. Arnold is an American philanthropist and businessman. We talk about the . Usually the division of labor in most of our work is that I talk, Laura Arnold says in a phone interview. Without Centaurus, which started in 2002 with just a handful of traders and now has 70 employees, focuses on this virtual kind of trading. Fight back. [8] In 1996, a year after starting at Enron,[8] he moved to oversee the trading of natural gas derivatives at the Natural Gas Desk upon the departure of Jeff Bussan. A 2016 study to determine the effectiveness of the badges showed that the number of articles that reported publicly available data had increased tenfold. Six months later the Arnold Foundation made a $4.7 million seed grant to the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), the nonprofit Taubes cofounded to support fundamental research on diet and health. Scientists believe lasting symptoms following a coronavirus infection is not a single disorder. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Reflects change since 5 pm ET of prior trading day. THE ARNOLDS had been dabbling in philanthropy for years, supporting a few handpicked programs in education, criminal justice reform, and other areas that were important to them. Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researchers work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Sign In, Listen to the latest episode of our newest podcast, 2023 North American Pipeline, LNG & Market Hubs Map, 1Q23 N.A. Together with Taubes work, Arnold was also reading Ioannidis and Goldacres equally devastating analyses. In 2007, Arnold became the youngest billionaire in the U.S. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund specializing in trading energy products that closed in 2012. And then, after a couple of years, people were like, oh, no, hes actually like that.. John Arnold. He started working at Enron four days later. [39], Arnold Ventures LLC has invited criticism with its involvement in many controversial areas. And those are just a few of the people who are calling out iffy science with Arnold funding. Hockey cards didnt have much of a market in Texas, he tells me. Abandoning traditional nonprofits in favor of LLCs may be the ultimate expression of donor privacy under the First Amendment, but it also means rejecting our philanthropic institutions at a time when so much of the nonprofit landscape is made up of policy groups. His estimated net worth is $3.3 billion as of writing. He is unapologetic about having worked at Enron, and he can be defensive about the moral standing of Wall Street in the public mind. Yellen warned inaction could have wide-ranging financial repercussions, including on taxpayers and the federal governments credit rating. He was an entrepreneurial kid, earning some $50,000 before leaving high school by marketing collectible sports cards in the internets early years. In the 1830s, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville famously compared Americans penchant for civic association with that of France and England: Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.. Previously, Mr. Arnold founded and was CEO of Centaurus Energy, a multi-billion dollar energy commodity hedge fund. Bruce Kovner, Caxton Associates . In 2012, the Arnolds joined the Giving Pledge, an oath made by billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to donate at least half of their wealth. In 2019, William Schambra, co-editor of The Giving Review and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, pointed out that the field of 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s), and foundationsincluding their tax benefits as well as respective legal limitationsexists because they are ways weve chosen, as a democracy, to encourage and channel charitable giving and political activism. We circumvent them at our peril.
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