Elliott Investment Management

Paul Singer

Paul Singer runs Elliott Investment Management, an activist hedge fund he founded in 1977 with $1.3 million raised from friends and family. He studied psychology at the University of Rochester and took a law degree from Harvard Law School before practicing corporate and securities law in New York. Elliott began as a convertible arbitrage operation — betting on the relationship between a company's bonds and its stock — and only later evolved into the shareholder-activist and distressed-debt machine it is known as today. The firm takes large stakes in companies and uses that leverage to push for changes: new boards, cost cuts, break-ups, and restructurings, holding its positions through years of fighting where necessary. It has applied the same pressure to governments as well as corporations, and that is where its most famous story lies. After Argentina defaulted on roughly $81 billion of debt in 2001, Elliott's affiliate NML Capital bought some of the country's defaulted bonds for around $117 million. Argentina offered to pay holders pennies on the dollar in restructured notes, but Singer's firm refused, sued, and spent more than a decade in court — seizing an Argentine naval vessel as collateral along the way. In 2016 the new Argentine government settled, paying Elliott about $2.4 billion on bonds with a face value of roughly $617 million, a return that made the fifteen-year standoff one of the most profitable and consequential episodes in the history of activist investing.