Background and career
Paul Elliott Singer (born August 22, 1944) is an American hedge fund manager, activist investor, and the founder, president, and co-CEO of Elliott Management. As of September 2025, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$6.7 billion. Fortune described Singer as one of the "smartest and toughest money managers" in the hedge fund industry. A number of sources have branded him a vulture capitalist, largely on account of his role at Elliott Management, which is a vulture fund. The Independent has described him as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going after countries for unpaid debts". Singer's Elliott Management has focused on activist campaigns, in which they take an equity stake in a company and agitate using influence and voting rights to encourage change, and they have also expanded into private equity. Singer's political activities include financial support for LGBTQ rights. He has provided funding to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is a strong opponent of raising taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, such as himself, and opposes aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act. Singer is active in Republican Party politics, and he and others affiliated with Elliott Management are collectively "the top source of contributions" to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Singer is a supporter of Israel and has donated to pro-Israel causes.
Singer was born in 1944 and grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, in a Jewish family, one of three children of a Manhattan pharmacist and a homemaker. He graduated from Teaneck High School as part of the class of 1962. He graduated from the University of Rochester with a B.S. in psychology in 1966 before receiving a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1969.
In 1974, Singer went to work as an attorney in the real estate division of the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
In 1977, with a convertible arbitrage "winning formula", Singer left law to create his own investment company. He founded the hedge fund Elliott Associates L.P. with US$1.3 million in seed capital from various friends and family members. According to The Telegraph in 2011, Elliott is "one of the oldest hedge funds on Wall Street". Singer is also the founder and CEO of NML Capital Limited, a Cayman Islands-based offshore unit of Elliott Management. Singer was involved in most of the big restructurings after the 2008 financial crisis. In 2009 The Guardian reported that Singer "through a brilliantly complex financial manoeuvre, took control of Delphi Automotive, the sole supplier of most of the auto parts needed by General Motors and Chrysler". Ultimately, the US Treasury paid Elliott Management "$12.9 billion in cash and subsidies from the US Treasury's auto bailout fund". In December 2011 Elliott Associates sued Vietnam's state-owned shipbuilder Vinashin in the UK for defaulting the year before on a US$600 million syndicated loan. In February 2014, Singer controlled $23 billion (£19 billion) of funds and was the ninth largest investor on Wall Street. In June 2015, Singer was an active activist investor with Citrix Systems, pushing for various changes. In May 2014 the French Financial Markets Regulator fined Elliott a record €14 million ($22 million) for insider trading, a ruling which the company appealed. In 2015, as part of a long-standing dispute between Singer and members of the Lee family over a merger between Samsung and Cheil Industries, Samsung published numerous cartoons of Singer as an anthropomorphic vulture on its corporate website. The cartoons were denounced by Singer and others as antisemitic. Samsung responded several days later denouncing antisemitism, and pulled the images from their website.
Forbes rated Singer's net worth as $2.1 billion in 2015, and $2.2 billion in 2016. As of November 2015, Elliott Management Corporation oversees Elliott Associates and Elliott International Limited, which together have more than $27 billion in assets under management in a "multi-strategy fund". The corporation includes a private equity division. Termed a "specialist in activism in technology companies" by The Wall Street Journal in June 2015, Elliott Management's varied portfolio also includes a prominent tech component. The company pursued "more than 40 campaigns aimed at tech companies" between 2004 and 2015, according to Reuters.
On 1 February 2020, several weeks before many Americans had heard of COVID-19, Singer wrote a memo to his employees about preparing for the possibility of being quarantined for at least a month due to the virus.
