The New Soros

Photo: Victor Llorente

Alex Soros lives in the duplex penthouse of a building in downtown Manhattan. The elevator opens onto the apartment, where a framed photograph of Alex and his fiancée, Huma Abedin, sits on a small table by the entrance. Apart from its artwork I am asked not to identify for security reasons, his home is sleek and uncluttered and has south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows and an exposed spiral staircase leading to the upper level. An atriumlike living room is appointed with white leather sofas Abedin dislikes, and is in the process of replacing, and a glass coffee table, on which rests a recent compendium on sculpture co-edited by Alex’s mother, Susan Weber, a historian of the decorative arts.

He invites me to meet him there for the first time in early February, not long after his return from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the architects of globalization watched from Alpine remove as their consensus positions on free trade, migration, and international relations were, one by one, abandoned in Donald Trump’s new Washington. For years, Alex’s father, George Soros, the founder of the family’s Open Society Foundations, was a headliner at Davos. In the Soros household, Alex dryly notes, late January held special significance: “I would go back to school, and my father would go to Davos.”

Alex, 39, is dressed in black leather boots, black pants, and a black turtleneck, a uniform that matches his pallid complexion, intense demeanor, and Ph.D. in European intellectual history. I have been cautioned that he is socially uneasy and impatient with chitchat. “I don’t know how to explain this,” says his close friend Svante Myrick, the former mayor of Ithaca, “but he will walk away from a boring person mid-sentence.” After mumbling pleasantries and offering to make me an espresso, Alex sits down at a dining-room table, ready to answer questions. Working on a laptop at the table is 62-year-old Michael Vachon, an intimidating, arch-loyal adviser whom Alex offhandedly and with only a trace of irony calls his father’s consigliere.

The setting itself is a testament to a certain indifference to public opinion on Alex’s part — or perhaps a lack of awareness. This past fall, he held a fundraiser at the apartment for vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, then created a PR headache by posting photos from the event on social media, as is his custom after meeting heads of state and elected officials. (As a former OSF higher-up says, Alex likes to collect “shiny objects.”) It was deemed unhelpful to a presidential ticket straining to underscore its regularness that the son of the 94-year-old hedge-fund billionaire accused of puppeteering the Democratic Party was publicly advertising his centrality to the election effort from a New York City penthouse.

In a way, Alex was being transparent: Between the roughly $100 million he spent to elect Democrats and the several hundred million more his endowed foundations spent on sympathetic causes, George was probably the biggest liberal donor of the most recent election cycle. (It is hard to know for sure because of untrackable dark-money spending.) Alex told The Wall Street Journal it was better for the family to operate in full view rather than be subject to antisemitic tropes about shadowy Jewish financiers. “There’s a view that we are some sort of hidden conspiracy,” he said.

The right ascribes a near-unlimited influence to George — from orchestrating the Women’s March and other mass protests in the U.S. to funding migrant caravans from Latin America to undermining Christian values in Europe — and coverage of his activities can imply that he is personally tipping the scales in various causes and races. The reality is that, while the money is his, George is no longer active. It is his chosen successor, Alex, the second youngest of his five children from two marriages, who now makes the bets as president of George’s super-PAC and chairman of his $20 billion philanthropic empire. This functionally makes Alex the key megadonor poised to bankroll the liberal movement for years to come.

Alex’s appointment in late 2022 jarred loyalists and veteran hands in his father’s orbit. A decade ago, he gained a “Page Six”–stoked reputation for decadent Hamptons parties and stereotypical heir behavior. He follows dozens of models on Instagram; fellow billionaire benefactor Michael Bloomberg follows unicef and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. But in private he is brooding and cerebral and has a propensity for candor and bursts of hot-temperedness. His halting, Peter Thiel–like baritone is full of ahs and ums, and his sentences can sound like records skipping, as if he were unable to easily put into language what is clear in his mind.

This slightly tortured persona has invited comparisons with his elder half-brother Jonathan, who sprang from Harvard Law School and a federal clerkship to work alongside his father in finance and philanthropy. Jonathan is described as an even-keeled presence and looked the part of a successor, down to his cheerful, full-faced resemblance to a younger George. After Alex was announced as chair, the organization’s first president, Aryeh Neier, spoke for many when he said, “I expected Jonathan to be the one.” Someone with deep OSF ties says, “The real story is that every single person who knows the family knows that Alex was exactly the wrong person to lead the foundation.”

When Soros insiders try to explain the family dynamic, they draw on the standard texts of empire and heredity. “Roman is Alex,” says a former OSF senior official, referring to Roman Roy, the sardonic failson in Succession. “Smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the details.” Another Soros insider cites not HBO but the Gospel of Luke, casting Alex in the role of the Prodigal Son, who is rewarded with his father’s love despite his wayward years.

If Alex feels underqualified to be a liberal power broker, he doesn’t show it. When I ask for his autopsy of the presidential election, he breezily argues Joe Biden was “assassinated” by “the pundit class” after his disastrous debate, erasing a proven Trump-beater from the ballot while giving his successor too little runway to achieve liftoff. “The fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump had gone on that debate stage and, you know, shit his pants and had a heart attack, Republicans would still be there saying, ‘Yeah, he’s our guy,’” he says. “That meltdown that we had publicly is a discipline problem.”

As invested as he is in the success of the Democratic mainstream, Alex is simultaneously supportive of the party’s progressive wing, via OSF-funded NGOs that advocate left-leaning stances on immigration, criminal justice, and other issues. As one donor adviser puts it, Sorosworld is the “metronome” that sets the tempo of the progressive movement. When I ask him to respond to the critique that many of these groups — or the Groups, in Beltwayspeak — were responsible for pulling the party too far left and costing it the election, he is dismissive. “First of all, it’s not smart after an election to go after your base,” he says. “Second of all, you know, the quick takes, the hot takes — let’s see which age well.”

Alex might be too entangled in the institutions of liberalism, ranging from the centrist Establishment to the activist pressure groups, to perceive its failures. And that’s not even to mention his impending June wedding to Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide-de-camp and the ex-wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner — a gift to anyone looking for proof that the globalists are at last closing in on a one-world government, with the Weiner side plot as a prurient throw-in.

But Alex has a penchant for arguing both sides, like someone who enjoys playing chess with himself. Despite his reluctance to criticize the activists his foundation funds, he can seem out of sync with them, rolling his eyes at the advertising of one’s pronouns and the left-wing censoriousness of the past era. (“Should we, you know, have rebelled against … Dave Chappelle?”) And though he might sometimes seem a Davosboy to his father’s Davosman, he finds the corporate-friendly scene at the World Economic Forum pretty lame, using his princely status there to look bored at panels and mock its shibboleths. In an onstage interview a couple of years ago, he announced to the gathered neo-liberals, “Neoliberalism is dead.” Absent a new socioeconomic model, he forecast, “the alternative will be owned by MAGA extremists, by populists, by nationalists.”

As we spoke throughout the spring, Alex could be maddeningly discursive about the Trump administration’s escalating assault on civil society, which may well come next for his own organization. He said America was in a “nihilistic moment,” and he worried about the “lasting damage” the president was inflicting — even as he dismissed Trump as a self-destructive chaos agent. “I talk to real strongmen around the world, and they laugh at him.”

Exactly how to push back against the madness he leaves unclear. Nor does he offer any coherent agenda for the Democrats, whose roiling, inconclusive debates can seem personified by Alex himself. He was a regular presence at the Biden White House, one-half of an odd power couple, yet few in the broader political universe have a grasp of how he thinks about the world and plans to spend the wealth at his disposal. That money could help determine the fate not only of a rudderless Democratic Party but of a country that every day is disappearing legal residents and immigrants, shaking down universities, defying court orders, and otherwise taking aim at the very open society his father’s global philanthropy exists to uphold. After the intrusions of the Kochs and the Adelsons, America is in its most nakedly oligarchic era since the Gilded Age, one in which the most visible billionaire ultradonor, Elon Musk, has taken charge of swaths of the federal government. Alex Soros, an aspiring kingmaker who also spends the better part of his day in his own head, is, for better or worse, standing on the other side.

Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine; Photographs: New York Post; Sonia Moskowitz, Getty Images; Matteo Prandoni, BFA/Shutterstock; Madison McGaw, BFA/Shutterstock

An hour or so into our first meeting, Alex’s chief of staff, Laura Silber, shows up to accompany him to his next engagement, a tour of the new Anne Frank exhibition at the Center for Jewish History, where he is on the board. Silber also oversees communications for OSF, and like Vachon, she has known Alex since he was a kid. She manages many of the practicalities of Alex’s life and accompanies him more or less everywhere he goes. Although he is almost 40 years old, Alex has a distracted, adolescent quality. I suspect he is not fully aware of his own calendar and must often be dragged by Silber to things that are on it.

Silber invites me to join them at the exhibition, and the three of us head down after she hails an Uber. Alex groans: “Do we have to give them money?” He means Uber. We hop in the SUV, and he begins a vexed monologue about the start-up types he’d bump into when he was a grad student at the University of California, Berkeley. “The people who worked at Facebook, the people who created Uber, they really believed their own bullshit. They really believed they were helping the world,” he says. “It was a bunch of nice Jewish boys who kind of gamed the system and, Oh, lets not become doctors, lawyers; I’m helping the world by putting taxis out of business.”

Alex tells me amusedly that after the election he drew the attention of Musk, who once compared George Soros to the X-Men anti-hero Magneto, a Holocaust survivor and mutant who wants to eradicate mankind: “He was responding to a lot of my tweets, liking them or stuff, and he said, ‘I’d be curious to meet you and learn more about your goals.’” A mutual grantee tried to put them in touch. “We are both believers in civil liberties, or I guess we both used to believe in civil liberties; now, he’s against them. He used to be a believer in climate change; now, he’s against it.” Alex says he never heard back: “Maybe it was the backlash from the MAGA crowd or, I don’t know, he got scared or he just wanted to troll me.”

The exhibition includes a full-scale reconstruction of the rooms Anne Frank lived in before she was taken by the Nazis. Walking among us are tourists, retirees, teenagers. Later, Alex discusses the way the “Never Again” attitude toward the Holocaust has faded as young Jews take Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as their focal point for assessing their historical identity. But during the 30-minute tour, he walks in a foggy silence, his hands jammed in the pockets of his coat. Afterward, our group repairs to a conference room for pastries and he attempts a compliment: “It’s a good exhibit. I mean, being a connoisseur of these types of things, I’ve seen one in every European country in my life.”

George was born less than a year after Anne Frank, in 1930. His father, Tivadar, an enterprising, secular-minded lawyer, helped his family and others survive Nazi-occupied Budapest by producing false papers. Given the antisemitic animus he would later face, it is an irony that George spent his adult life mostly aloof from his Jewish identity. Unlike Alex, a liberal Zionist who observes Jewish holidays, George was indifferent to the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence, but I don’t want to be part of it,” George told The New Yorker in 1995. As his biographer, Michael T. Kaufman, explained it, George has a “contempt for tribal sectarianism of all kinds.”

When George was 17, not long before Hungary fully transformed into a Soviet satellite, he left for London. Out of a sense of practicality, he chose to study economics, but this was a slog because he was bad at math and aspired to become a journalist or public thinker. At the London School of Economics, he fell under the spell of the Vienna-born political theorist Karl Popper, whose famous 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, attacked Plato, Hegel, and Marx for advancing rigid, “closed” models of historical determinism, which Popper argued paved the way for totalitarianism. An impeccably timed defense of western liberal values, its appeal was plain to someone who had experienced the encroachments of both fascism and communism.

At 21, George submitted a letter to Popper hoping to enlist him as an adviser, saying he wished to avoid becoming “a dilettante or a crank.” But George didn’t have the discipline for scholarship, and their correspondence withered. After university, he picked up work in London as a trader, arbitraging securities. In 1956, at the age of 26, he moved to New York, where his brother, Paul, was already working as an engineer.

Even as his finance career blossomed and he established his Quantum Fund — for decades one of the best-performing hedge funds in the world, made famous by George’s legendary short of the pound sterling in 1992, which stoked England’s “Black Wednesday” crisis — George privately toiled on philosophical treatises. He called his big idea “reflexivity,” a Popper-influenced theory about the human fallibility behind the seesawing of markets. He would eventually publish his insights on the economy and global conflict in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, but the reflexivity concept didn’t catch on and he was disappointed not to be taken seriously as a profound thinker. At the height of his influence, a journalist asked George to name something he didn’t have. “I want my ideas to be heard,” he said plaintively.

In fact, his genius as a trader came partly from his instinctual, unsystematic way of thinking. (His eldest son, Robert, also a financier, said George would take a position based on how his back was feeling.) George’s charismatic style has also informed his philanthropy. In the glasnost 1980s, the Open Society Fund, as it was then called, spent extraordinary sums to liberalize the economies and civil societies behind the Iron Curtain. Famously, he mass-shipped Xerox machines to repressive Hungary, where it had been virtually impossible to disseminate media. In the 1990s, he funded scientific research in Russia, preschools in the former satellite states, independent television stations in Ukraine, and humanitarian relief in Sarajevo. Called a “one-man Marshall Plan” for the post-Soviet era, George liked to cheekily fuel his critics’ worst suppositions about his globe-bestriding influence. “If this isn’t meddling in the affairs of a foreign nation, I don’t know what is!” he cheerfully told The New Yorker.

George was already in his mid-60s when he got involved in American political life. In the cautious environment of the 1990s, he funded then-radical programs to reform end-of-life care and harsh drug sentencing, bankrolled the California ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana, and created a new fund for immigrant rights in response to restrictive Clinton-era legislation — all of them libertarian-inflected gambits to “open” what he felt remained closed in the U.S.

Already tagged as a “Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization,” his adversaries began to criticize him in a more sinister light in the aughts, when he became a major Democratic donor. By the time Fox News’ Glenn Beck aired a three-part special labeling him “the puppet master” in 2010, the Soros-bashing–industrial complex was crystallized. His partisan enemies do not regard him as a vital adventurer-speculator liberating Eastern Europe with one hand and making billions of dollars with the other but as a decrepit Emperor Palpatine spreading malignancy from a throne somewhere.

Of his five children — three with his first wife, Annaliese Witschak, and two with his second, Susan Weber — four ended up serving with him at the fund or the foundations in one capacity or another. If any took up his mantle in business or philanthropy, they would inherit not just wealth and power but the burden of expectation. In 2011, he wrote a retrospective essay about his charitable giving in the New York Review of Books. “I was able to move fast and take big risks,” he wrote. “What will be missing when I am gone is the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit.” Whoever succeeded him, George was explaining, would have an impossible act to follow.

On a Monday afternoon in late February, Alex and I meet again at his apartment. He has just recovered from a bout of COVID, following his return from the Munich Security Conference, where Vice-President J. D. Vance shocked attendees by lecturing Germany on the so-called electoral fire wall its political parties use to block the influence of the anti-immigrant party Alternative für Deutschland, among other European anti-extremism norms Vance called undemocratic. “I definitely got the Vance-laced Munich COVID,” Alex jokes, more relaxed upon our second meeting. “The spheres-of-influence COVID, the new geopolitical variant.” But Alex’s take on Vance’s address is typically ambivalent: “Regarding freedom of speech, look — there are some things in there I rhetorically agree with. But fire walls in Germany specifically exist for a reason. All anybody needs to do is pick up a history book to figure out why.”

What bothered him more than the speech was Vance’s decision in Munich to meet with the AfD’s leader and not with German chancellor Olaf Scholz, reflecting the Trump administration’s ongoing pullback from the post–World War II NATO alliance. “The AfD, you know, they run on not having an American presence there,” he says. “They’re anti-American. But then I would say, in my view, Vance is anti-American. He’s against America. You know, at least the America that defeated Hitler, the America that desegregated.”

We’re sitting on the white living-room sofas as the setting sun glints over the East River. Vaguely chaperoning us is Vachon, this time on his phone. Alex says the first intimate conversation he can recall with his father was when he was in second or third grade, and George told him a different part of the story of his life under Nazi occupation each day of a ski holiday. Alex was profoundly marked to the point of dissociation from his own life in 1990s America. He explained it later in an essay: “Already set apart from my peers by incredible material wealth, I felt the need to fight doubly hard to stay grounded,” adding that a “fanaticism towards sports and a compulsion to stay up-to-date on current events defended me against further alienation and gave me a way to relate and communicate with (I hate the term) ‘ordinary people.’”

George’s first three children were born between 1963 and 1970, long before he became a famous billionaire. When he remarried in 1983, says Susan Weber, they couldn’t get the New York Times to cover their wedding. The family’s position soon changed, and for Alex, his father has been a public figure for almost as long as he can remember. When the kids were attending Trinity in their elementary-school years, one of them hosted a birthday party in the family’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Weber recalls one of their friends showing them a Guinness Book of World Records in which George was cited for his money-making exploits. The Soroses later moved to an estate in Katonah, where there were golf carts and a stable of exotic animals. A classmate of Alex’s told the New York Post that the students called it the “Richie Rich” house.

Alex revered George — “a giant among people” — but was also wounded by his chronic absence. Weber, who was pursuing her own career as an academic, says George “never changed a diaper — well, I remember, he took one off once.” He had an old-world approach to family life: “Dinner was at eight. There was a way to be dressed, to behave at the dinner table.”

Alex recites from a speech he gave at his father’s 80th-birthday party, which he says George loved. “Before I was born, my father would say to my mother and her friends that he couldn’t wait for kids. He loved the sound of children around him in the background. And not until I was born did they really understand that he meant in the background.” He adds, “But I would also say that we all have our private pain, and the one thing I learned from my father, one thing I find so abhorrent about this notion of politics we live in today, is this kind of grievance and victimhood.”

Alex says he wanted to graduate from childhood altogether. He says that at King Low Heywood Thomas, a prep school in Connecticut, he “played on the basketball team, and my best friend at school was the philosophy teacher. That was my life.” “He was much more interested in the adult conversations — who was coming to the house, who was at dinner,” Weber says. “He starts reading Nietzsche at a too-early age. He becomes sort of difficult to live with.”

Weber and George divorced in 2005, when Alex was studying at New York University. “He would just call me, and we would kind of hang out as buddies,” Alex says. He found his father changed: “He was a vulnerable, older person.” Since Alex was older too, “George also found Alex more interesting,” Weber says. Alex graduated from NYU in 2009, then matriculated into UC Berkeley’s distinguished history program to get his Ph.D. “I thought it was very important for me — for my confidence, for my place in the world — to go do something that nobody could say, ‘You know, that’s just because he’s …,’ you know,” Alex says in his low mumble.

His doctoral adviser, Martin Jay, stresses that Alex did not migrate to the East Bay for tutelage in political militancy. “He was not immersed in radical-leftist identity politics, decolonizing the world, as so many Berkeley grad students find congenial. He has, I think, very solid, responsible liberal instincts,” Jay says. His dissertation was about the 19th-century satirist and lyric poet Heinrich Heine, a playful “Jewish Dionysus” appreciated by Popper whose attacks against religious and nationalistic ideas later caused the Nazis to try to erase his legacy from Germany.

It was also in this period that Alex started showing up in the Post and posting Instagram photos from courtside at Madison Square Garden. He was partial to oversize sneakers and fitted caps, and his crew included an apparent “model-wrangler” for Hamptons weekends as well as the former Knick Joakim Noah. At one point, Alex enlisted the party photographer Patrick McMullan to help him better pose for pictures. When I spoke with Myrick, the former Ithaca mayor, he assured me Alex’s hedonistic persona was misleading: “He would throw parties but not attend them, Gatsby style. I was in the pool. He was not in the pool. He was always up there, trying to talk seriously with somebody.”

This sounded like spin. (Plus the nonprofit Myrick now runs receives funding from OSF. It is hard to find purely objective sources in Alex’s orbit.) But Alex’s grad-school friend Ari Edmundson, now a lecturer at Berkeley, told me that, however Dionysian his past might have been, Alex is not that person today. “As somebody who saw multiple sides of him, he is so much more comfortable in his skin right now,” he says. “His life is harder, but he has a mission and the sense of purpose and meaning and maturity that that brings.”

As George neared 80, it was the expectation of Jonathan and others that he would succeed his father as OSF chairman after his death. But in 2011, Jonathan quit the fund and then took an extended leave from the foundation’s board amid an apparent rift. OSF sources cite personality clashes — George is rash; Jonathan is deliberate — and say Jonathan was ready to move on when it became clear his father wasn’t going to relinquish control. In any case, George told a reporter he didn’t see any of his children as natural leaders of OSF.

Alex joined the OSF board in 2011 and set up his own charity. Still, as a graduate student and playboy, he was not seen as a player in family affairs. “I thought at that point you were going to go more into academia,” Vachon says in Alex’s living room. “But then, I think — you would remember better — you started traveling with George a lot.”

“Well, George told you to look after me,” Alex says. “But it wasn’t, like, in a ‘Watch out for him; he’s gonna fuck up’ way. It was like, ‘This is my son. I love him.’” Alex became a doting presence, transforming into his father’s travel companion and understudy. He says his father had a romantic notion that his sons should go off and have an “adventure” away from him. He told George he thought this was a cop-out: “I said, ‘I know you want to be able to say you’re a bad father. And you want me to kind of just go away and come back and not have to deal with me.’

“I said to him, ‘No, come on — I enjoy your company. You’re my father, and I’m going to be your loyal parasite. I’m going to be by your side.’”

In 2017, George named Alex his vice-chair at the foundation, and a few years later, he appointed him his successor. In a rare public comment, Jonathan, who had by then permanently stepped away from OSF, said, “I always knew he could change his mind. As a trader, it’s the thing he’s most famous for.”

Some confidants of George’s stress that the appointment was a matter of timing rather than a “beauty contest” between two siblings. “George agonized for years about which child should take over the foundation and for many years did not want any of his family involved, and by the time he was ready to turn it over to one of his kids, Alex was ready and wanted the job,” says someone with a longtime relationship to the foundation. Still, practically everyone I spoke to agreed that Jonathan would have been a safer pick. “We all love the family; they’ve done so much for the world. We’re all terrified Alex is going to get called up before some congressional hearing and do a terrible job,” says the foundation insider.

Anxiety around Alex’s selection is tied to his aptitude for leadership. Locked inside his thoughts, he comes off as a kind of Hamlet. One former Soros official says George’s decision was a “cruel kind of love to impose on Alex.” He imagined an easier future for Alex in which he had instead followed his passion for sports or philosophy. Others argue that Alex’s temperament worked in his favor. “George would say that Alex shares his willingness to take big bets, his willingness to fail,” says a different ex-OSF figure.

When I ask Alex to explain the ways he is making the foundation his own, he resists, painting the transition as a continuum. “When he would introduce me, he would say, ‘I’m the failed philosopher, and Alex is the successful one,’” he says. “I don’t think that my father would have been comfortable in any way if he didn’t see similarities, right? We’re both not the most patient people. We both don’t do very well with boredom. We’re both result-driven — we like to win.”

Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Alamy/Alamy Stock Photo

Alex and Huma started dating in late 2023. In a detail that will delight Alex’s enemies, they met at a birthday party their friend James Rothschild, of the banking family, threw for his wife, the heiress Nicky Hilton, in the Meatpacking District. “First of all, she’s very attractive,” he says, explaining what drew him to Abedin. Alex goes on to compliment her resilience in the wake of the Weiner scandal and emphasize the shared elements of their biography. A decade his senior, Abedin also grew up with an intellectual, old-world patriarch for a father. “I hadn’t been in a relationship for a very long time — ten years or something like that — that had lasted for more than three months. And it’s, like, the first time I realized I had been mistaking lust for love,” he says.

Their friends point out a natural symbiosis between the professional handler and her unpolished fiancé. “Her superpower is making every room she is in kind of run better, smoothing out the rough edges, remembering something about everybody,” says a Washington operator who knows them both. “And that complements Alex.” Abedin herself stresses a different point of connection when she calls me from a wedding they’re attending in Sarajevo. “It’s a little bit of a surreal experience to be in a relationship with Alex,” she says. “I had never imagined I would meet someone whose life so seamlessly blended with mine. To have this kind of peripatetic life in politics and public service, this constant state of preparing for the next election, preparing for the next campaign, preparing for the next conference — I don’t have to explain anything to him and vice versa. It’s not unusual for me to turn around at 4 a.m. and Alex is not there: He’s on a call, dealing with some crisis.” In that, she says, “there’s a certain kind of stability and comfort.”

That Alex is on the brink of being literally wedded to the American political Establishment marks a departure for the family. George first got involved in U.S. presidential elections in 2004, spending a then-mammoth $27 million to boost the John Kerry campaign. He was horrified by the erosion of civil liberties taking place under George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” and the false pretenses the administration used to invade Iraq. But he wasn’t a particularly partisan figure and got bored by the nuts and bolts of domestic politics. He told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that year that people “send me books of polls, but frankly, they’re not of much interest. I don’t read them.” He skipped the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Alex takes a different approach. This past August, he was all over the DNC, posting Instagram photos of himself in hotel suites or luxury boxes with Chuck Schumer, Bill Clinton, Gretchen Whitmer, Pete and Chasten Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock, Keith Ellison, Eric Swalwell, Jasmine Crockett, Nancy Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz (for the first time), Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords, Hakeem Jeffries, Ruben Gallego, and Chris Murphy, plus shots of him and Abedin gazing fixedly at the Jumbotron of Chicago’s United Center. Below them were his boilerplate captions: “all in for Kamala who was flawless last night!”

Alex’s fondness for collecting powerful figures embarrasses people at the foundation. It also underscores his influence. OSF is by some measures the second-largest charitable foundation in the United States, trailing only the Gates Foundation. It gives out roughly $1.5 billion a year, and it spends its U.S. budget not only on liberal causes but also on some of the big dark-money nonprofits aligned with the Democratic Party, including America Votes, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and the pro-Harris spending group Future Forward USA Action. Soros Fund Management, which manages OSF’s endowment, is the largest investor in the podcast network Crooked Media, which broadcasts Pod Save America. Then there are the Soroses’ voluminous campaign contributions to Democrats, rivaled only by those from billionaires Michael Bloomberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Reid Hoffman.

When Biden was inaugurated as president, Alex ramped up his presence in Washington. Grading on a curve, some came away impressed. “A lot of what happens with these people who have a lot of money is they’re like, ‘I have a brilliant idea: Why haven’t these stupid people in government thought of my brilliant idea?’” says one Biden official. Not so with Alex. “It wasn’t like he was arrogant; he wasn’t offering crazy ideas.” Another D.C. source says he was less interested in trying to twist arms than in cultivating power: “It was not ‘Change this piece of legislation.’ It was ‘I want access to talk about foreign policy.’”

It can be helpful to discuss world affairs with a Soros, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, tells me: “Often when I was talking to George Soros, he was reflecting the views of x number of European leaders. That’s what separated him in my mind from just a Democratic donor. It wasn’t just he gave a certain amount to the DNC. This guy is probably in contact with a dozen European leaders on a regular basis.” The Biden team and Alex might have been useful to each other on the matter of Ukraine, where OSF has contacts on the ground. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, it has invested close to $65 million in war-crimes documentation, building international support, and other areas.

Some Democrats worried that his chronic in-the-room-ness could be taken advantage of or backfire. “Why are the Qataris meeting with him? The fear is they are meeting with him as a conduit to the White House,” one says. “The Biden team did a very good job at making him feel taken seriously as a global actor while safely managing what information to share.” Says a political acquaintance, “He just gets so much access to people, so he can be like, ‘Well, Ron Klain’” — Biden’s chief of staff — “ ‘told me, Da da da da da.’ His ability to scrutinize that information is a little bit off.”

Meanwhile, Alex could come across as aloof about the changes roiling the philanthropy that began during his time as heir apparent. “Alex’s interest is not in how an organization’s operations function,” says its president, Binaifer Nowrojee. “He was like, ‘Yeah, fix the place,’ but he wasn’t involved in it.” While he was posting selfies from state dinners, OSF was in a period of rock-bottom morale, thanks to layoffs and restructuring efforts designed to move the unwieldy organization into a nimbler, post-George future. “Both George and Alex carry the notion that they are about ideas first. We could not go a day without talking about Karl Popper,” says someone who operated in OSF’s higher rungs. “A debate about whether human rights are dead would take over a board meeting. I was like, You gotta be kidding me. Can we get it together?  ” Alex didn’t sell the changes well to the newly unemployed when he told the Financial Times his father never meant for the organization to be “an employment agency.” Since 2017, OSF has gone from about 1,700 employees to around 500 today.

Behind the organization’s reset was a painful admission that after four decades and some $30 billion, the world was no longer bending in George’s direction. The foundation’s well-meaning civil-society initiatives had not in fact permanently opened repressive societies; many of the key theaters George played in, from Myanmar to Russia, have closed back up. “We must acknowledge this reality and adjust our strategies accordingly,” Nowrojee said in a recent speech in Cape Town. As part of its restructuring, OSF has shuttered or scaled back programs devoted to public health, early-childhood education, journalism, and university scholarships.

OSF insists such grant-making will continue in other formats, but it’s undeniable Alex seeks to reorient the foundation’s emphasis. “Alex has always fully respected that work but felt it would only have the efficacy and impact and long-term sharpness if we focus like a political philanthropy in the first instance, if we think about who has power, who is making decisions within states and societies,” says OSF senior vice-president Leonard Benardo.

A few years ago, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government kneecapped nonprofits aiding refugees, an effort dubbed the “Stop Soros” law that represented its latest attack on the foundation. George was forced to withdraw OSF’s presence from his home country. “I think about what happened in Hungary, and I think one of the lessons we learned is that civil-society organizations, it’s a double-edged sword,” Alex says. The more a foundation pushes universal values like human rights or free press, the more it might be accused of serving global or elite interests rather than national ones.

What good was an institution like Budapest’s Soros-founded Central European University, in other words, if an autocratic regime could force it out of the country? And what if such a regime were to do that here? If OSF’s new remit was to shift the balance of power, the question was how.

This past November, a postelection consensus began to congeal everywhere from the liberal New York Times to the progressive Nation to the Substacks of the “popularist” center: Blame the Groups. The argument: Nonprofit advocacy organizations had pressured the Democratic Establishment into unpopular left-wing positions on issues such as policing, gender, and immigration by claiming to speak for the party’s multiracial working class, when in reality they represented a highly educated sliver of the party. As a result, once-reliable blue-collar voters who disagreed with these positions rejected the Democratic Party and Donald Trump won the presidency.

Trump’s victory turbocharged the Groups critique, but it had been brewing for years. In 2003, the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol published her book Diminished Democracy, which argued that cross-class membership organizations like unions, churches, and social clubs were steadily being replaced by top-down NGOs, which claimed mass engagement but were really just clearinghouses for petitions and donations. Two decades later, nonprofits have gained only more political sway. “If you’re your average foundation-funded NGO, you now want to say, ‘I am a social movement, not just a foundation-funded NGO,’” the political scientist Daniel Schlozman said recently. Except: “It turns out it’s all money from the Ford Foundation and Open Society. And they’re not doing much of anything except talking to each other.”

Amid the right’s obsession with demonizing George Soros, there is scant mainstream understanding of what OSF actually does. One thing it does is fund the Groups. In the summer of 2019, eight progressive NGOs teamed up on a campaign to pressure the Democratic presidential field into pledging to decriminalize border crossings. They were United We Dream Action, Working Families, MoveOn, Indivisible, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Women’s March, Sunrise, and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. Though the policy polled poorly, eight of ten presidential candidates at a debate that June pledged their support for it. (Joe Biden and Michael Bennet did not.) OSF has funded seven of the eight groups. Later, a ninth group, Latino Victory Project, vowed to apply pressure on Biden. It also receives OSF funding.

Some OSF-backed groups focus on economic issues. But much of its U.S. budget flows to archetypal Groups “pressing for racial equity” or that aim to “support immigrants’ rights” or engage young voters on “voting rights, gun safety, reproductive freedom, LGBTQI+ rights, and climate change.” In 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests, OSF nearly doubled its annual U.S. budget, to $400 million.

The most controversial aspects of OSF’s portfolio revolve around criminal justice. In 2020, it subsidized the Drug Policy Alliance’s successful push to decriminalize all personal drug use in Oregon via ballot initiative, an extreme experiment the state legislature reversed last fall. A year later, OSF backed the unsuccessful referendum to dismantle the Minneapolis police department. Outside the auspices of the foundation, which cannot engage in partisan politics, George has spent millions on dedicated super-PACs to support 46 reform-minded prosecutors around the country, 33 of whom won election. Amid pandemic crime spikes, some have since been voted out of office, including Loudoun County, Virginia’s Buta Biberaj and Los Angeles’s George Gascón.

Alex’s approach to the 2024 presidential election also involved subsidizing Groups via the family’s Democracy PAC. Traditionally, the Soros political operation favors get-out-the-vote tactics. After Kamala Harris secured the Democratic nomination, Alex felt that Georgia might be in play and funneled $10 million to the left-leaning BlackPAC for a rural African American mobilization program. He directed millions more to galvanize turnout in the Rust Belt states and Texas, where the Soroses fund a super-PAC devoted to turning the state blue. The Texas group said its mission was “driving up Democratic turnout by targeting people who will support Democrats if they vote, but may not vote at all unless someone comes to their door.”

In effect, Sorosworld’s electoral strategy offered a way not to choose between its idealistic and pragmatic missions — adopting a theory that relied less on persuading moderates than on spurring unmotivated liberals to vote. The problem is those voters hardly exist anymore. In 2024, Trump upended the outdated wisdom that high turnout helps Democrats, racking up gains among exactly the types of infrequent voters whose doors canvassers were knocking on. As the Democratic data scientist David Shor put it recently, “We’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do” — reflecting the drift of non-college-educated minorities away from the Democrats. Says one adviser to a donor, “They say, ‘There is no persuasion anymore. It is mobilization — you turn out your base.’ That is fucking wrong.”

When I put the Groups critique to Alex, he is ready with a number of rebuttals. Against the idea that left-wing activism has provoked electoral backlash from minorities, he argues, “the George Floyd protests may have been the reason that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. It galvanized people to vote; it’s maybe why we won Georgia.” When I suggest the Groups are better at talking about criminal-justice reform than about crime occurring in people’s neighborhoods, he blows his lid: “Just lock them up? Throw away the key? Start killing people? What do you want?”

At one point, Alex suggests Democrats have lost credibility with working-class voters by not talking enough about fentanyl. Benignly, or so I think, I say that fentanyl in turn exposed the party’s weakness on border control. At this he bristles, free-associating his way back into a more progressive pose. “These solutions that they’re prescribing on fentanyl, including going back to these draconian ideas of mandatory minimums on drug possession, we know it won’t work,” he says. “We now have 20 years, 30 years of data on the effect of prisons on young men.”

As we talk, Alex seems to grow literally heated, peeling off his blazer and resuming battle in a tight black T-shirt. In other moments in our conversation, however, he seems entirely sympathetic to the Groups critique. Regarding the Trump administration’s wokeness purge, he says, “The fact that we’re sitting here and defending DEI as an acronym and we’re taking the bait on that pisses me off because, like, I think that is something McKinsey made up.” The environmentalist group Sunrise comes up, and he makes a face. “What the hell did they do, by the way? We gave them money, and now all they do is talk about Palestine. It’s ridiculous.” His friends and allies repeatedly stress that Alex is no left-winger. “One of his closest relationships in Washington is with Chuck Schumer,” one Beltway player reminds me. In 2025, the Soroses’ most prominent expenditures haven’t been on progressive advocacy but on the battle for the Wisconsin Supreme Court that turned into the most expensive judicial election in American history — which the Democrat won despite Elon Musk pouring more than $20 million into the race.

What Alex seems reluctant to do is to choose among these competing forces. When I ask him which Democrats might lead the party, he practically lists them all. “Who do I draw inspiration from when I listen to them speak? Josh Shapiro is great. AOC is great. You know, Raphael Warnock is great. You know, Gretchen Whitmer is great. I mean, I like Tim Walz. Chris Murphy. Brian Schatz. Like, these guys are great.”

Earlier this spring, I visited the midtown offices of the Open Society Foundations to meet Nowrojee, the Kenyan human-rights lawyer and longtime OSF officer Alex appointed as president last year. “When I first came in, I said to Alex, ‘I really would like to have something of your vision. We know what George is about,’” she says. “And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t really want to do it.’” According to Nowrojee, “He didn’t want some stone tablet where we kind of put it on a wall and say, ‘Alex Soros said this; now, everybody must march.’ That’s exactly what an open society is not, so he was very loath to do that.”

As Alex and I spoke through the early part of the year, I kept asking him how OSF planned to address Trump’s deepening attacks on some of the very “open society” causes it funds: civil liberties, academic freedom, immigrant rights, the rule of law. The work of defending democracy has finally jumped from the theoretical to the frighteningly actual, while also possibly reinforcing the impression that the Democratic Party is an out-of-touch organ for elite class interests. He resisted straight answers, telling me that “now is the time to play defense” and that his most important job was to help Democrats win back power in the 2026 midterms. “We’re not subscribed to a strategy, because I think anybody that has a strategy right now is crazy.” In our last conversations, he made references to von Clausewitz, Thomas Jefferson, French pamphleteers, Lenny Bruce, Slavoj Zizek, the manosphere, the statue of Teddy Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History, and the Compromise of 1877, but he did not put forward anything approximating a vision.

Again and again, he says his priority remains power, however the Democrats can attain it. Before the election, Alex was wholly fixated on beating Trump: “Everything else doesn’t matter.” Now that Trump has won, he wants to prevent more winning. “The courts, they’re not going to save us. We put faith in concepts that don’t exist in real life, like the separation of powers. It takes one man to violate those and nobody to do anything in order for that to just be shredded,” he says. “And I think that’s the very important lesson, right? Leadership matters.”