Background and career
James Altucher (born January 22, 1968) is an American hedge-fund manager, author, podcaster and entrepreneur who has founded or cofounded over 20 companies. He has published 20 books and is a contributor to publications including The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post.
Altucher was raised in a Jewish family in North Brunswick, New Jersey. Altucher attended North Brunswick Township High School and graduated in 1986. Altucher graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1989.
Altucher's first job after graduating was in the IT department at HBO. At one point, Altucher hosted a web-series for HBO.com called III:am. In 1998, Altucher left HBO, sold a company he founded, Reset Inc., for approximately $15 million, and used the proceeds to fund new internet investments. Altucher has said he began this period with $15 million and lost it all in two years, which led him to re-evaluate his approach to both business and life. During this time, Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com hired him to write about stocks, and Altucher began trading for hedge funds. From 2002 to 2005, he traded for several hedge funds, and, from 2004 to 2006, ran a fund of hedge funds. In 2006, Altucher founded the financial social network, StockPickr. The website was named one of Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites of 2007. Altucher sold the company for $10 million in 2007. In 2017, he began advising on cryptocurrency investing, despite having condemned Bitcoin in 2013 as "a fad, or a scam, or a Ponzi scheme, or worse." However, in May, 2013, he built a store to sell his book, "Choose Yourself" for Bitcoin a month before he released it on Amazon. He was interviewed by Business Insider about why he reversed his stance on Bitcoin. Altucher was a seed investor in Buddy Media, which later sold to Salesforce.com for $745 million in 2012.
This podcast was 369 episodes in total between 4/21/2014 until 10/8/2015. The podcast became “temporarily unavailable” to listen to, sometime in May 2024.
In August 2015, Altucher launched a podcast with Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, called Question of the Day, based on questions from Quora. This has since finished but had a reunion in 2020.
Altucher also hosts The James Altucher Show, which has featured Tim Ferriss, Mark Cuban, and Arianna Huffington, among others. Altucher says it has more than 40 million downloads.
