Mr. Scaramucci grew up on Long Island, in Port Washington, N.Y., where one of his first jobs was delivering Newsday. He has written two books, “Goodbye Gordon Gekko” and “The Little Book of Hedge Funds.” He started SkyBridge Capital in 2005 as an incubator for hedge fund managers after spending seven years at Goldman Sachs and helping to found a money-managament firm.
After the financial crisis, many hedge funds shifted tactics to attract new investors. SkyBridge bought Citigroup’s hedge fund unit and then reinvented itself, opening up to investors with as little as $25,000. Many top hedge funds, by contrast, required a $10 million investment. SkyBridge is a manager of a portfolio of hedge funds — a “fund of funds.”
“I’m a middle-class kid from Long Island, and neither of my parents went to college,” Mr. Scaramucci told The Times in 2013. “Why shouldn’t more people have access to this industry?”
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In 2011, he tried to join the rarefied club of major league sports owners as part of a group that considered buying a stake in the New York Mets. The deal never materialized.
Mr. Scaramucci is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Although he donated to Mr. Obama’s campaign in 2008, he supported Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, saying that America need “more practical, less partisan people.” He was one of Mr. Trump’s biggest critics during the presidential race before becoming one of the first on Wall Street to back him. He called Mr. Trump a “hack politician” and warned that his politics were divisive.
Strongly opposed to Hillary Clinton — “You can search and see the weather vane on top of her head,” he once said — Mr. Scaramucci had trouble settling on a Republican candidate. He initially backed Mr. Romney, then Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.
“I’m not looking for my political fingerprint to match the identity of my candidate,” Mr. Scaramucci said in acknowledging unease among wealthy donors over Mr. Walker’s shift to the right on social issues. He expressed alarm, however, about how, as a candidate, Mr. Trump spoke about hedge fund managers, calling him “misinformed” on Twitter.
Mr. Scaramucci changed his mind by the time Mr. Trump’s head campaign fund-raiser, Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive and hedge fund veteran, appeared at Mr. Scaramucci’s Las Vegas conference last year.
Mr. Trump, Mr. Scaramucci said, was “saying cuckoo-la-la things to insult the intelligentsia because what he’s discovered is that the average American, the red-meat-eating Middle American, loves the swipes at the know-it-alls, and I think Donald Trump is enjoying doing that.”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/business/dealbook/trump-media-scaramucci-wall-street.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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