Background and career
Rajakumaran Rajaratnam (born June 15, 1957) is a Sri Lankan-American former hedge fund manager and founder of the Galleon Group, a New York-based hedge fund management firm. He is also the author of his memoir, Uneven Justice: The Plot to Sink Galleon. In 2008, Rajaratnam was listed as the 262nd richest man in the United States, according to the latest Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans. He was convicted of insider trading in 2011 and served seven and a half years in prison, in a case that arose amid heightened post-2008 financial crisis enforcement against Wall Street.
On October 16, 2009, he was arrested by the FBI for insider trading, which also caused the Galleon Group to fold. He stood trial in U.S. v. Rajaratnam (09 Cr. 01184) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and on May 11, 2011, was found guilty on all 14 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud. On October 13, 2011, Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison and fined a criminal and civil penalty of over $150 million combined. Rajaratnam was incarcerated at Federal Medical Center, Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts, an administrative facility housing male offenders requiring specialized or long-term medical or mental health care. Rajaratnam was released to home confinement in his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, located on Sutton Place, in the summer of 2019. Rajaratnam being released after 7 1/2 years, published his memoir, Uneven Justice, detailing the events surrounding his insider trading conviction and the alleged prosecutorial overreach he claims took place.
Rajaratnam is an ethnic Sri Lankan Tamil born in Colombo in what was then the Dominion of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) to J. M. Rajaratnam, who was the chairman & CEO of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. Sri Lanka in 1970 and the vice president in South Asia. and mother Rajeshwari, a homemaker. He attended S. Thomas' Preparatory School, Kollupitiya before his family migrated to England in 1971. He attended Dulwich College in London and later studied engineering at the University of Sussex, and then earned an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.
Rajaratnam started his career as a lending officer at Chase Manhattan Bank where he specialized in business loans to technology companies. He joined the investment banking boutique Needham & Co. as an equity research analyst in 1985, where he focused on the consumer electronics and Technology sector. He rapidly rose through the ranks, becoming the head of research in 1987 and the president in 1991, at the age of 34. At the company's behest, he started a hedge fund—the Needham Emerging Growth Partnership—in March 1992, which he later bought and renamed Galleon Group. His hedge fund was valued at $3.7 billion in 2009, down from a peak of $7 billion in 2008. According to a 2009 investor letter his $1.2 billion Diversified Fund had a net annualized return of 22.3 percent. Rajaratnam has been featured among the elite US money managers in a book called The New Investment Superstars. Initially, he primarily invested in technology and healthcare companies. He said that his best ideas came from frequent visits with the companies in which he invested and from conversations with executives who invested in his fund. After Rajaratnam's arrest, Galleon received requests from its investors for the withdrawal of $1.3 billion, which caused the fund to close. In a letter dated October 21, 2009, Rajaratnam informed his employees and investors that he intended to wind down all the funds of the Galleon Group. Investors received the full balance of their initial investments, plus profits, in January 2010.
Additional context at Raj Rajaratnam, Galleon Group, Anil Kumar, and Rajat Gupta insider trading cases
On Friday October 16, 2009, Raj Rajaratnam was arrested by the FBI for insider trading in the stock of several publicly traded companies. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara put the total profits in the scheme at over $60 million, telling a news conference that it was the largest hedge fund insider trading case in United States history. Jim Walden, an attorney for Rajaratnam, said his client is innocent and would fight the insider-trading charges. Some commentators have linked Rajaratnam’s prosecution to the political and regulatory climate that followed the 2008 financial crisis. In a 2021 Forbes column, contributor John Tamny argued that heightened public anger toward Wall Street after the crisis created pressure for high-profile prosecutions of financial executives, and that Rajaratnam became a symbolic target in this environment. Financial media also reported that Rajaratnam’s arrest occurred amid a broader post-crisis crackdown on Wall Street and hedge funds by U.S. prosecutors following the collapse of financial markets in 2008. Rajaratnam was accused of profiting from information received from the individuals listed below:
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
