The Wolf of Hungary - The Early Years of George Soros
Forging Survival in 1944’s Nazi Shadows, Fleeing Hungary’s Red Grip in 1947, and Carving a Path Through England’s Grit
TL;DR: This article traces George Soros’s journey from a cunning teenager surviving Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944—forging papers and shrugging off guilt—to a penniless émigré hustling in England, studying at the LSE under Popper’s influence, and stumbling through odd jobs like selling trinkets, before breaking into finance at Singer & Friedlander in 1953, laying the groundwork for his billion-dollar empire and controversial “philanthropic” Open Society network.
Stumbling across the name George Soros is practically inevitable, isn’t it? Dig into this man even slightly—a billionaire wielding his colossal wealth to splash philanthropy across the globe—and you might find yourself dazzled by his persona, his supposed tireless crusade for humanity. Here’s a self-styled champion of the downtrodden, who, even in his twilight years, never seems to tire of preaching his gospel of social justice and “open societies”.
With influence that stretches like a shadow over nations and resources that dwarf the GDP of small countries, Soros allegedly pours his fortune into crafting a world where dignity reigns, human rights are sacrosanct, opinions flow freely without fear, and dictatorships crumble into dust—all while moral virtue supposedly shines like a beacon. Who could argue with such a utopia? A world of peace, cultural harmony, and universal freedom—sounds like a dream worth buying into, doesn’t it?
Yet, under this saintly narrative the cracks start to show. Dig deeper into Soros and his sprawling web of influence—those vaunted Open Society Foundations meddling in dozens of countries, especially Eastern Europe—and you’ll trip over inconsistencies that sting like a slap to the face. His words don’t always match his deeds; the outcomes of his “noble” interventions often reek of contradiction.
You’re left wondering: what if all this humanitarian fanfare is just a mask? What if, beneath the finely spun tapestry of benevolence, lurks a colder, more calculating agenda—geopolitical chess moves dressed up as charity, designed not to uplift humanity but to tighten the grip on power for his own selfish ends? The thought gnaws at you, doesn’t it?
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Let’s not kid ourselves about how Soros built his empire. This isn’t some rags-to-riches fairy tale—it’s a saga of a hedge fund predator who raked in billions, sometimes destabilizing entire economies in the process. Remember the 1992 Black Wednesday fiasco, when he famously “broke the Bank of England”? The British pound tanked, Soros pocketed a cool billion, and millions of ordinary people were left scrambling in the wreckage.
Rings a bell? Nathan Rothschild pulled the same stunt back in 1815 at Waterloo. While Napoleon ate dirt against Wellington, Rothschild’s couriers beat the news across the Channel—victory was Britain’s. But he didn’t shout it. Instead, he slumped into the London Exchange, dumped bonds, and sparked a panic. Prices tanked as traders sold off, clueless. His men bought cheap, and when the truth hit—boom—Rothschild cashed in big, leaving the suckers broke. Soros echoed the exact same move centuries later.
Did he lose sleep over their plight? Hardly. To Soros, it was just another round of the grand game—spotting imbalances, exploiting them ruthlessly, and cashing out while the world burned. He’s bragged about it himself, calling himself a master of disequilibrium, a vulture circling the chaos he helped create. Insider trading? He’s convicted in France, no less—but the million-dollar fine was pocket change to a man like him. For the average Joe, it’s a parking ticket; for Soros, it’s the cost of doing business. His track record screams profit over people, every single time.
Everyone’s got his name in their mouth—whispering about his shadowy influence, branding him the bogeyman of global chaos—yet somehow, the guy remains a cipher. We’ll obsessively unravel Klaus Schwab’s every move, poring over his World Economic Forum machinations like it’s a crime scene, but Soros? He slinks by, untouched, while we shrug and let the rumors fester.
Philanthropy’s just the billionaire’s playground, a glitzy PR stunt to polish their egos and agendas. Soros isn’t the exception—he’s the poster child. For decades, these tycoons have twisted society into knots under the banner of “good deeds,” all to lock in their own dominance. The idea that he’s a saintly outlier? Laughable.
He’d thunder against fossil fuels in public, then sink millions into coal companies behind closed doors. Classic Soros—hypocrisy’s his calling card. Sure, you could call it speculation and move on, but how far does that excuse stretch? Far enough to meddle in global politics, stirring the pot just enough to tilt the board in his favor?
Soros is toppling nations and continents with his “open society” gospel, all to line up his next economic kill—rigging markets and geopolitics like a puppet show. Is his web of influence a slow chokehold on Europe? Those migration projects he funds nonstop—why the fixation on shuffling populations instead of fixing the source? Chaos as strategy, perhaps? How thick does this mask of duplicity get?
The questions stack up like a house of cards ready to topple. Voice them in this so-called “open society,” and you’re instantly slapped with the Nazi label—smeared before you can blink. Stray an inch from the suffocating leash of political correctness, and the gatekeepers pounce.
Freedom of press, of thought? Fading fast, and it’s no coincidence. History’s littered with this script: when a “grand design” kicks into gear, only one opinion gets a hall pass—everything else is fair game for the shredder. Billionaires like Soros and their cronies wield the full arsenal—guilt trips, blacklists, financial muscle—to gag the doubters. It’s almost too predictable, the way the wheel keeps turning, grinding dissent into dust.
Let’s circle back to the gnawing core of it all: what’s the real engine driving George Soros’s relentless machinations? To hack through this tangled mess, I’ve leaned hard into sources still dangling within reach of the average citizen—at least for now.
The internet still offers a rare shot at sidestepping the suffocating echo chamber of mainstream drivel, provided you’ve got the spine to question it. Say what you will about its chaos, but it’s a lifeline for those unwilling to swallow the uniform sludge peddled by the so-called “respectable” outlets—which, don’t worry, get their fair share of airtime in this dissection too.
Books and the web aren’t rivals; they’re a tag team begging to be exploited. That’s why this thing’s littered with references—breadcrumbs not just to back up the juicy bits but to nudge anyone curious enough toward Soros’s own words, his allies’ spin, and the raw data itself.
I didn’t just sip from the mainstream’s tepid well. I deliberately dredged up those “disreputable” voices too. Why? Because “seriousness” is a cozy little cloak for sidelining anything that doesn’t kneel to the altar of political correctness. It’s a simple racket: slap a “credible” stamp on what fits the script, and anything else gets tossed into the “fringe” bin before it can breathe.
But how “serious” are these self-anointed “quality media” gatekeepers, really? Plenty of sharp minds have spilled ink exposing how facts and truth take a backseat to agenda-driven sculpting in the elite press. People aren’t as blind as they used to be, though—the herd of “conspiracy theorists” keeps swelling. And when the powers-that-be can’t handle the heat, they just sling mud and crank up the chokehold on dissent. What happens when the crowd flips and joins the “tinfoil” ranks en masse?
It’s like that old gag about the ghost driver barreling down the highway, hearing a radio warning, and muttering, “One ghost driver? There’s thousands of ‘em!” Clinging to stale labels and strangling free speech isn’t just petty—it’s a Molotov cocktail. Even the level-headed are starting to drift from the center, feeding the very spiral the “responsible” claim they’re trying to stop. You’d think the masterminds would spot the feedback loop, unless they’re too smug—or too complicit—to care.
So, I had no choice but to haul in a raft of alternative reports, countering the one-note symphony that dominates elsewhere. It’s the only way to snag details about Soros and his labyrinthine network that you’d never catch in the sanitized Western press.
I’m not delusional enough to think the truth about Soros can be distilled into a neat little vial. The man’s a puzzle too snarled for that. His moves always have a method—smarter, slicker than most politicians could dream. He’s a slippery target for critics, no question. But expecting a smoking gun to pin down some grand plot is rookie naivety. This isn’t about staging a gotcha moment or dragging Soros to the gallows. I’m not here to “prove” he’s puppeteering the planet. What you’ve got is a take. Me sifting through the mess without pretending to be some ivory-tower thesis. No airtight case, no grand theory, just a pile of clues that’s hard to ignore.
Much of the dirt comes straight from the horse’s mouth—Soros’s own boasts, snippets from his inner circle, verifiable moves he’s made, self-aggrandizing tales spun by his network, and financial entanglements that scream louder than words. You don’t need a decoder ring to see how his “independent” NGOs often march in lockstep with the U.S. government’s leash. String these threads together, and the pattern’s undeniable—conclusions practically draw themselves.
This is here to connect some dots, with my own slant bleeding through, no apologies. But let’s be real: everyone’s got to wrestle their own truth out of this swamp. Especially when it’s the big one—how much sway does this Hungarian-born American tycoon actually hold over Europe’s future? What’s his hand in the upheavals, the refugee floods crashing the continent’s gates? And what’s he really chasing? Some will scoff it’s obvious, crowning Soros the grand puppet master of a global plot without a second thought. Others will clutch their pearls, indignant that a “philanthropist” of his caliber could even be whispered in the same breath as conspiracy. Good—let the clash happen. In a so-called open society, every voice should get its shot.
Soros is s a wild character to study, though I’m not here to play judge and jury on his soul. That’d take peering into the man’s core, a feat damn near impossible. Still, the traits he’s flaunted himself, the ones that crack open the case, can’t be swept under the rug—nor can the slick maneuvers that stacked his fortune. His market games aren’t the main event here, though; it’s the sprawling web he’s woven and its tentacles gripping the world that steal the show.
Pinning partisan badges on this mess, like the lazy hacks love to do, is a cheap dodge. It’s a grimy trick to sideline inconvenient noise, nothing more. Truth doesn’t pick teams—left, right, whatever. Petty tribal squabbles are a distraction when the world’s this warped. Personally, I wouldn’t trust a single political outfit out there to see past its own nose—none of them have a platform worth a damn. But facts? Nobody seems to give a rip about those anymore. It’s a pathetic circus of emotions—politics, media, the whole public charade.
The upcoming articles hone in on Europe’s mess and Soros’s fingerprints all over its recent convulsions—teasing out what this mega-speculator might be scheming. With damn near every source laid bare—open for anyone with a pulse to chase down—the curious can dig deeper and maybe, just maybe, walk away with a sharper take. If that’s all this thing pulls off, it’s already done its job. You’d hope some folks out there still lift a finger for others without turning them into pawns for some lofty—or selfish—game.
Soros’s saga reads like a pulp novel, brimming with dazzling triumphs and shadowy twists. He’s billed as the lone Holocaust survivor with a rap sheet—whispers still swirl that he, a Jew, cozied up to the Nazis. A sphinx in a suit, Soros is a riddle wrapped in contradictions, preaching his “open society” gospel while his past festers with unanswered questions.
This Hungarian-born hedge fund maestro stormed the U.S. and conjured a billion-dollar empire from thin air. A cunning predator of the trading floor, he’s one of those dreaded locusts of global finance—armed with a razor-sharp mind, a dash of ruthlessness, and a gambler’s nerve to claw his way to the top of a cutthroat game. He’s the stuff of legend, the dishwasher-to-billionaire myth on steroids, living proof of the American Dream dialed up to obscene excess.
Today, Soros sits on a fortune north of 32 billion U.S. dollars. A fraction of a percent would bankroll a lifetime of decadence most can only fantasize about, yet no tongue’s big enough to taste that kind of wealth. So what does an aging man, already creaking toward the grave, do with a war chest that vast? Especially one like Soros, who couldn’t care less for the usual high-society fluff—yachts, galas, and other rich-man toys bore him to tears.
No, Soros has grander designs. He’s hell-bent on sculpting a “better world”—not just any world, mind you, but his world, a meticulously crafted Soros-verse ticking to his rules. It’s the kind of omnipotent fantasy you’d expect from an atheist playing God, a blueprint less about humanity’s uplift and more about his own towering ego.
Born György Schwartz on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, his arrival was cosmic fanfare—or so the story goes. The Perseid meteor shower lit up the sky that night, tears of the heavens raining down, while a near-full moon toyed with the stars. Astrologers might salivate over 1930’s other debut: Pluto, the underworld’s dwarf planet, named in the same year. Back in the day, that’d be a bad omen scrawled in the stars, but for Schwartz, the heavens would soon align in his favor.
Hailing from a well-off Jewish family, his early years weren’t all roses—yet even then, he had a knack for turning lemons into gold, a selfish streak he’s owned up to in countless interviews over decades. His father, Tivadar Schwartz, was a sharp lawyer and Esperanto enthusiast, a forward-thinker with a flair for reinvention.
In 1936, he swapped “Schwartz” for “Soros”—a name plucked from Esperanto meaning “to rise” or “ascend,” shedding Jewish echoes for something Hungarian-flavored. Little György was six, on the cusp of school, when Tivadar ditched religion entirely—though, truth be told, the family was never devout to begin with. It was a pragmatic pivot, and for Soros, the ascent had just begun.
As Soros himself recounts, his mother was downright giddy about the name switch, thrilled to shed the Jewish label she saw as a scarlet letter. Yet, the world didn’t get the memo—people still pegged them as Jews, and when Soros hit high school, the only slot open was in the Jewish class.
No escape from the branding iron there. Curiously, his father didn’t play the victim card under Nazi terror. His life was a high-stakes rollercoaster—straight out of a war novel. Soros claims the old man was hauled off to a Siberian POW camp in World War I, where he masterminded a prison break and bolted, catching a front-row seat to the Russian Revolution’s bloody debut.
That grit came in handy during the German occupation, Soros says. Tivadar, a lawyer with a supposed reverence for rules, learned fast that in times of upheaval, laws are just paper waiting to burn. Survival trumped everything—principles be damned.
On March 19, 1944, German tanks rumbled up to the Danube—D-Day for Hungary’s Nazi takeover. George Soros was barely 14, but he swears he didn’t feel death’s breath on his neck. The whole “nightmare” wouldn’t last, he figured—the Nazis were already crumbling across Europe, the war’s end in sight. Yet the occupation dragged on for a brutal year.
The fascist Hungarian Iron Cross kept the killing spree alive to the bitter end. Soros recalls strolling through Budapest, passing a lamppost where two Jews dangled, a sign swinging below: “This is what happens to a Jew who hides.”
Spiegel’s Gregor Peter Schmitz, in a book-length chat with Soros, prodded him—didn’t that rattle you, a kid seeing that? His reply’s a gut punch: “Sure, but we’d prepared.” That’s it—a curt “sure,” softened by a shrug about precautions. It’s a peek behind the mask: a guy wired with a chillingly thin vein of empathy, eyes locked on self-preservation. His own people strung up, a public spectacle of horror, yet it’s no big deal if his own hide’s safe. Tivadar had forged papers to shield the family and others—a common move, fair enough.
Budapest’s “laundries” churned out doctored IDs, but the Soros clan leaned so hard into it that dates got jumbled—siblings’ births landed months apart, forcing them to dodge group outings. Eleven hideouts kept them scattered. During German police checks, young George was a trembling wreck—“nearly pissing myself,” he admits—clutching fake papers, knowing it was life or death. His life, his death. “I always made damn sure no one saw me pee—I was circumcised, a Jewish boy,” he recalls.
Still, he paints that year as a grand lark. Across interviews decades apart, he doubles down with eerie consistency: 1944 might’ve been his happiest stretch. “Put yourself in my shoes: a 14-year-old kid, living this wild ride under my dad, who I idolized. It was thrilling,” he’s said. Twenty years earlier, chatting with Budapest-born journalist Krisztina Koenen—a Soros fan, no less—he echoed the same vibe. She marvels, stunned: “You’d be hard-pressed to find many Jews in Europe gushing about those years with that kind of zest.
Soros claims he carried a primal faith in his own survival back then, a cocky instinct that he’d come out on top. He waxes nostalgic about his childhood too—his German nanny, a soft spot for Germany and its tongue. His father, Tivadar, was adamant about splitting hairs between “Germans” and “Nazis”—not every German was a monster, not all bore the swastika’s stain.
Even after the invasion, chatty Tivadar still haunted cafés, striking up a chummy bond with a German officer while the family hid in the shadows. This officer, a Breslau pharmacist, once vented to him about the grim chore of lining up Jews for deportation. And who was there to pat his back? Tivadar, the Jew, soothing him: “It’s just your duty—refuse, and a military court’ll fry you. Don’t beat yourself up as long as you’re not hurting anyone.” Soros recounts this warped scene with a smirk: “Pretty ironic, a Jew in hiding consoling a German officer.”
It gets weirder when you peek at Soros’s own antics. After Tivadar bribed a Hungarian agriculture ministry flunky named Baumbach to take in young György and pass him off as a Christian, the kid flipped a strange switch. Soon, he was tagging along as Baumbach confiscated Jewish property. At first glance, it’s cut-and-dry: a 14-year-old, strong-armed into compliance, survival trumping all else—don’t blow your cover, just grit your teeth and ride it out. But decades later, when Soros opens up about it, his spin doesn’t slide off so easy.
On December 20, 1998, Steve Kroft—Vietnam vet turned 60 Minutes ace—sat down with Soros. Grainy deportation footage flickered behind them as Kroft laid it out: “You watched countless people shipped off to death camps.” Soros didn’t flinch: “Yeah, I was 14. That’s when my character got forged.” Kroft pressed: “How so?” Soros leaned in: “You learn to think ahead—grasp events, anticipate them, especially under threat. It was this massive, evil menace—up close and personal.”
He copped to aiding the property grabs, as Kroft put it, who then prodded: “That sounds like the kind of thing that’d land most folks on a shrink’s couch for years. Was it tough?” Soros brushed it off: “Not at all. Not one bit. As a kid, maybe you don’t connect the dots. It wasn’t a problem—no issue.” “No guilt?” Kroft asked. “Nope,” Soros shot back, cool as ice.
Kroft couldn’t wrap his head around it, circling back to the guilt angle: “Like, ‘I’m Jewish, and here I am watching these people go. That could be me—I should be there.’ Nothing like that?” Soros flattened it into cold logic: “Well, sure, I could’ve been on the other side, the one losing everything. But it’s pointless to say I shouldn’t have been there—because, funny enough, it’s like the markets. If I wasn’t doing it, someone else would’ve—someone would’ve taken it anyway. So it boiled down to this: me being there or not, I was just a bystander. The stuff got taken. No guilt on my end.” And with that, he tied it up neat and tidy—problem solved. Not everyone could twist that knot so smugly.
What kind of moral compass guides a man who can shrug off his own wrongs with the excuse that someone else would’ve done it anyway? That’s not a universal salve to cleanse your hands and dodge guilt—it’s a bespoke philosophy Soros clings to like a lifeline. This notion that he’s just a stand-in, never the real villain, pops up again and again, a trusty shield for every questionable move. His interviewers, more often than not, just nod along, letting it slide without a peep.
Even Soros admits his gushing over 1944—a year he could ramble about for hours, calling it the happiest of his life—is a “crucial and paradoxical truth.” He writes: “I was 14, idolizing my father, who had everything under control, knew the moves, and helped others. We were in mortal danger, but I was convinced I was exempt. At that age, you don’t think harm can touch you. For a 14-year-old, it was the wildest adventure imaginable. That experience shaped me—learning survival from a master. It mattered for my finance career too.” Sure, he tosses in that his father aided others, but the words drip with self-obsession—me, my survival, my path.
Later, as the star investor, the spotlight never dimmed—everyone wanted a piece of the Soros myth, desperate to crack how this guy clawed his way to billions. He’s not the world’s richest, but he’s up there, and with his sprawling, slippery influence he might just be the most powerful. That self-focus could be chalked up to the world’s fascination with him, but dig into his early years, and you’ll find an egomania already blooming, paired with a chilling indifference to others’ fates.
Is that too harsh a take? Most folks hit moments that test their limits—Soros isn’t immune. Hedge fund guru Byron Wien, ex-Morgan Stanley bigwig, once asked if he’d faced any gut-wrenching moments before fleeing Hungary, and how they’d marked him. Soros, true to form, brushed it off: “Not wrenching at all. I knew the danger but felt invincible.” Then he adds: “The suffering around us was glaring, but we did everything to help.”
That drags those 1944 paradoxes back into the light—especially his chat with Steve Kroft. Help? Not quite. He’s got a different spin: he and the family scored cigarettes for Jews stuck in Jewish houses, unable to queue up themselves. Ponder that one. But then he drops a rare bombshell: “The only time I physically suffered was right after Budapest’s siege, with bodies everywhere. One victim had his skull bashed in—I felt sick for days.” One time, then, he felt the weight. Was it the raw threat to himself that hit him, or actual pity for the dead guy? The question lingers like smoke.
With these questions slung over our shoulders, the trail grows all the more gripping: how did George Soros morph into the grand philanthropist, and what schemes coil beneath his legion of foundations and outfits? It’s telling that the real obsession with Soros usually flares among those drooling over his financial playbook, itching to crack his golden formula for their own gain. The philanthropist Soros? He lurks in the wings, less dissected, less dazzling to the profit-hungry pack.
Not that Soros shies from sculpting his public mask—he’s no wallflower. But it’s the money wizard, the modern Midas minus the cursed touch, who reels in the speculators, the market vultures circling for scraps of his genius. Still, the climb to those first big wins was no overnight jaunt.
Soros leans hard on the debt he owes his father, Tivadar, yet he also gripes about chafing under the old man’s shadow. At one point, he told him flat-out: “It’s unnatural for a 15-year-old to think like a 50-year-old.” A quip that hints he was already outpacing his peers’ wits. .
Two destinations danced in his head: England or the Soviet Union. England, because the family gorged on BBC broadcasts, and teenage Soros swooned over “objective news” and the “British knack for fair play”—a delicious irony when you clock his later pound-crushing stunts. Fairness, it seems, bends to the beholder.
Then there was the Soviet Union, a system he was dying to dissect. His father, who’d survived its chaos firsthand, reminded him he could spill every gritty detail. Decision made—England it was, land of impartial headlines and gentlemanly honor.
First, though, came the grind: bureaucratic hoops and a family contact in England to grease the wheels for a school spot. The relative ghosted the initial letter from Hungary. Tivadar, ever the sage, drilled persistence into his boy—send a postcard every week, he urged, and the Brit would cave. It worked.
The Hungarian passport office was another slog, dragging its feet until Tivadar nudged Soros to track down the boss and raise hell. The head honcho snapped he’d issue a pass to anyone but “that obnoxious kid who won’t stop whining.” Yet the “obnoxious kid” won out, passport in hand. England beckoned.
In 1947, Soros tagged along with his father to Bern for the Esperanto World Congress, then, two weeks later—visa secured—bolted to Ipswich for the Esperanto Youth Congress while Tivadar headed back to Hungary.
Soros stayed put in England, ditching “Sorosz” for “Soros.” In plainer terms, he fled Hungary, dodging the communist tide swelling there. The 1945 elections saw the Communists scrape 17 percent while the Smallholders’ Party romped with 57 percent, but Soviet muscle kept the reds in the coalition. The February 10, 1947, peace treaty changed nothing—Soviet boots stayed planted, ushering in nationalization and a slide toward Stalinist iron rule.
Landing in England, Soros bided his time for a spot at the London School of Economics (LSE), scraping by as a lifeguard at a Brentford pool. He’d rolled into town a penniless foreigner, forced to bankroll his own education and survival. His father managed to funnel some cash early on, but Hungary’s political and social fabric was unraveling under Soviet chokehold—conditions so dire that only the 1956 uprising reunited the Soros clan in England.
While awaiting LSE, the future financial titan juggled gigs—painter, hauler, grunt for British Railways. His real hunger, though, was for philosophy. Before classes even started, he devoured texts, including Sir Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945.
Popper, the Austrian-British thinker who’d just arrived in Britain in 1946 and soon taught at LSE, struck Soros like a thunderbolt. In that book, Popper skewers a shared delusion of Nazism and communism: both cling to a supposed monopoly on absolute truth, a fantasy by human measure.
To prop up their warped visions, they twist reality into a pretzel, enforceable only through brute force—there’s no other way to ram such dogma down a society’s throat. These regimes dance to their own warped tune, blind to the world as it is.
Popper’s antidote? The open society, which calls bullshit on absolute truth from the jump—unattainable, a fool’s errand—and opts instead for a setup where clashing views coexist without bloodshed. It leans on institutions to keep the peace amid the mess of pluralism. Soros, having tasted both Nazi and communist boots on his neck, latched onto Popper’s framework like a lifeline. He became, in his words, “a fierce disciple of the open society ideal.”
That philosophical spark—later the backbone of his globe-spanning Open Society Foundations—didn’t soften the grim reality of Britain’s “open” arms. Soros recalls those early London days: “Life there was a cold splash of sobriety. No money, no mates. After my thrill-ride youth, I thought I was hot stuff, but no one cared. I was an outsider, tasting solitude. Then the cash dried up.”
He’d paid for a measly meal—then nada. That rock-bottom instant, the only time Soros ever stood penniless, lit a fire. “I’m at the abyss now—only up from here. This’ll toughen me,” he told himself. Half a century later, he bragged: “I’ve made damn sure never to hit that low again.”
Fate threw him a bone—a literal break. A work accident snapped his leg, but the railways coughed up compensation. From then on, Soros was cushioned, his financial footing secure.
After wrapping up his studies, Soros slammed into a wall of disillusionment—a phase he’d later call the nadir of his existence. The snag wasn’t homesickness or family ties fraying; it was the brutal reality of being a foreigner with no useful connections, a nobody in a land that didn’t care. Job prospects were a desert, and he’d soon feel that sting even sharper. His lifeline? A former classmate who tossed him a rope, landing him a gig at the same outfit where he worked.
So began Soros’s stint as a trainee at a company peddling a motley mix of costume jewelry, souvenirs, and trinkets. No formal training program existed—he was thrown in as a traveling salesman, hawking baubles up and down the Welsh coast in a creaky Ford Anglia, the cheapest heap the firm could muster. This wasn’t the dream. He hadn’t slogged through university to peddle cheap glitter, and even after amassing billions, he’d grimace at that era as a humiliating skid mark on his story. The gig was a bust—tabacconists wouldn’t bite, tied up with wholesalers, leaving Soros stuck in a dead-end rut.
To claw out of that mire, Ford Anglia or not, he needed a sharp pivot. Soros fired off letters to every merchant bank in London, addressing the head honchos directly. Bold move, but back then, skipping the middleman for the top brass was a long shot—especially for a stranger with no clout.
Lazard Frères’ chief took pity, inviting him in for a blunt reality check. London ran on a sacred code, he explained: “intelligent nepotism.” The brightest nephew—or someone with the right college tie—got the nod. No ties, no dice. “And you’re not even from here,” the boss added, as if Soros needed the reminder. Kindly meant, maybe, but it didn’t bend the rules.
The game was maddeningly simple: Soros needed something—anything—to link him to a banker. In 1953, he cracked it at Singer & Friedlander, a City of London merchant bank founded in 1907. The hook? Hungarian roots in the director’s chair—the same heritage that barred him elsewhere swung the door wide here.
The work, though, was a snore. Pay was worse than before, and Soros floundered. His bookkeeping was a mess—each night’s tally was supposed to zero out, but he botched it every time. The guy who’d later be their star alum couldn’t add straight. “Math was never my thing,” he’d confess.
Even at LSE, studying economics, he’d bristled at the pristine models—too neat, too detached. Yet this “math dunce” vaulted to the financial stratosphere—coincidence or a sly humblebrag? Hedge funds live or die by numbers, but Soros, per analyst Tom Woods, sneered at Friedrich Hayek’s “formalized, mathematical” theories—ironic, since Hayek himself trashed the math-heavy approach.
Whatever the case, Soros was done slogging at Singer & Friedlander. He cornered the boss, laying it out: he wanted out. That same day, over lunch with Robert Mayer—another trainee—he didn’t know it, but his life was about to flip upside down in minutes.
This marks merely the opening chapter of a deeper dive into George Soros—a sprawling tale yet to unfold. Stay sharp for what’s ahead, as we’ll peel back more layers of this enigmatic figure, tracing the threads of his life and influence. Meanwhile, pieces on World War I are also in the works, promising to unearth their own buried truths. But don’t sleep on Soros here—his story isn’t just a sideshow; it’s a critical piece of the jagged puzzle, steering us toward the grand, tangled picture it all feeds into.
Sources:
Schmitz, Gregor Peter: George Soros im Gesprach mit Gregor Peter Schmitz: Wetten auf Europa - Warum Deutschland den Euro retten muss, um sich selbst zu retten, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2014
Koenen, Krisztina: George Soros im Gesprach mit Krisztina Koenen, Eichborn, Frankfurt/Main
Moore, Art: Soros: This is »When My Character Was Made«, WorldNetDaily.com Inc., 2010
Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve
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Great stuff on Soros. Leave no hack-hero-villain intact.
Thought-provoking psychopathic predator proclivity from a young age. Perfect preparation for his later-in-life role..