Arnold grew up in Dallas. Sign In, Listen to the latest episode of our newest podcast, 2023 North American Pipeline, LNG & Market Hubs Map, 1Q23 N.A. A childhood math prodigy turned medical researcher, Ioannidis became a kind of godfather to the science reform crowd in 2005, when he published two devastating papersone of them titled simply Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. Now, with a $6 million initial grant from the Arnold Foundation, Ioannidis and his colleague Steven Goodman are setting out to turn the study of scientific practiceknown as meta-researchinto a full-fledged field in its own right, with a new research center at Stanford. John Arnold, "ph thy" ca gii u c nng lng On a warm October day in 2014, envoys from 15 of America's wealthiest families gathered at Circle T, Ross Perot Jr .'s 2,500-acre ranch outside . Usually the division of labor in most of our work is that I talk, Laura Arnold says in a phone interview. One of the counterparties Amaranth approached was Centaurus. By the following year, Nosek was cofounding an institution called the Center for Open Science with an initial $5.25 million grant from the Arnold Foundation. John Arnold has criticized labor unions, college tuition schedules, and the New York Timess increasing contempt for free speech. Donald Trumps real net worth? Fix terrible science. Yellen warned inaction could have wide-ranging financial repercussions, including on taxpayers and the federal governments credit rating. Stem Cell Junk Yards Reveal a New Clue About Aging. We talk about the . More generally, it may not be possible to truly reform a system where the incentives are already so deeply embedded. Arnold's hedge fund thrives as Amaranth falls - MarketWatch Former Enron Corp. energy trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus Energy Master Hedge Fund. The Centaurus founder could probably point to trades that made him a ton of money but you really can't put a price on avoiding the humiliation that would've come from . The United States is almost alone worldwide in granting tax deductions for charitable donations (Sweden also enacted such a policy in 2019), which were established with the Revenue Act of 1917. Centaurus will be returning capital to investors, according to a Reuters report that cited an unnamed investor who said the wind-down was described in a letter sent by Arnold to investors. Arnold was not criminally charged with any wrongdoing at Enron, but he was named in a bankruptcy lawsuit by other Enron staff. Abandoning traditional nonprofits in favor of LLCs may be the ultimate expression of donor privacy under the First Amendment, but it also means rejecting our philanthropic institutions at a time when so much of the nonprofit landscape is made up of policy groups. On the contrary, Arnold says he believes that most researchers go into their work with the best of intentions, only to be led astray by a system that rewards the wrong behaviors. Laura and John established the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in 2010 with a straightforward mission: to improve lives through evidence-based solutions. InfluenceWatch Podcast #267: Weingarten Will Not Be Apologizing. Still, Arnold, an intense worker with a wide network of. Had something similar happened on Wall Street, he tweeted, the perpetrator would have been sentenced to 10 years in jail and the bank would have been fined a billion dollars. Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. What do we actually know?. The comedian John Oliver spent 20 prime-time minutes on HBO last May mocking the reign of terrible science on TV news shows and in public debate: After a certain point, all that ridiculous information can make you wonder: Is science bullshit? Of course, this new LLC model comes with the cost of losing the Arnold Foundations tax exemption. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Not long after the podcast went online, he received a five-line email from Arnold. We support the principles of individual liberty, a free market economy and limited constitutional government: These are the cornerstones of American society. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert referred to researchers who had tried and failed to replicate the findings of one senior lecturer as shameless little bullies.. New clinical trials could more effectively reach solutions. He and a graduate student were developing an online system that would allow researchers to keep a public log of the experiments they were running, where they could register their hypotheses, methods, workflows, and data as they worked. The BMJ investigation, in turn, met with angry denunciations from nutrition experts who had worked on the US Dietary Guidelines; a petition asking the journal to retract Teicholzs work was signed by more than 180 credentialed professionals. Foerster, Marny Eng And John Oates On New Indie Dramedy Gringa, Chief Justice John Roberts Wife Made Over $10 Million As Legal Consultant, Report Says, John Rahms Golf Odds Reach Historic Low For 2023 Mexico Open, New Podcast By Shark Tank Alum Daymond John Announced Today Focuses On Defining Moments Of Influential People, A Celebration Of Film Composer John Williams With The New York Philharmonic, Elton Johns Honky Chteau Sounds As Mellow As Ever, John E. Murray (1959-2018): A Birthday Appreciation, The Top 10 Richest Women In The World 2023, The World's 15 Youngest Billionaires 2023, Billionaires 2023: The Top 10 Richest People In The World, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information. Enron billionaire frets about public pensions' solvency IN THEIR philanthropy, the Arnolds like to say, they follow data where it leads rather than let themselves be guided by ideology. Part In 2019, William Schambra, co-editor of The Giving Review and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, pointed out that the field of 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s), and foundationsincluding their tax benefits as well as respective legal limitationsexists because they are ways weve chosen, as a democracy, to encourage and channel charitable giving and political activism. We circumvent them at our peril. A new edition of the record evokes the feeling of the remarkable 18th-century studio in which it was recorded. A month after legendary natural gas trader Arnold abruptly announced that his Houston-based Centaurus would wind down its $2 billion master fund following a decade of unrivalled gains, Whalley. NGI Archives Natgas trading legend Arnold retires, ending era | Reuters The skeletal software behind the data-sharing project became a slick cloud-based platform, which has now been used by more than 30,000 researchers. Weve always defined success as sustainable change through policy. Media reports declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. Hes nowhere near as rich as he boasts, nor as poor as his critics claim. 1 manager, John Arnold, offers a tricky model to follow because he trades only energy futures, and my guess is he's a very short-term trader. [1], A 1995 graduate of Vanderbilt University, he completed a degree in mathematics and economics in three years. Background. 6. In 2001, even as Enron was collapsing amid an accounting scandal that covered up billions in debt, he was reported to have earned $750 million for the company. Says Goodman, Scientists really do want to discover things that make a difference in peoples lives. Is there something special about frauds in the securities biz that they should be penalized infinitely more harshly than other business frauds? he went on. About - Centaurus Financial, Inc.. Sign in to get the best natural gas news and data. Weve always wanted to improve peoples lives. Gas Trading Legend John Arnold Closing Centaurus Fund In 2007, Arnold became the youngest billionaire in the U.S. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund specializing in trading energy products that closed in 2012. Nosek says that the cash offers were Arnolds idea. As a general rule, the incentives related to quantitative research are very different in the social sciences and in financial practice, says James Owen Weatherall, author of The Physics of Wall Street. Arnold entered the investment industry out of college by working for Enron, the infamous natural gas conglomerate that collapsed in 2001 following revelations of its vast accounting fraud. The extent of that individuals ability to freely support causes may be magnified by using an LLC instead of a nonprofit, but it also further blurs the already faded line between philanthropy and politics. Text. Because investigating and replicating research begins with having the data and materials necessary to do so, he is particularly focused on making science more transparent. Inside the Secretive Life-Extension Clinic. Legendary natural gas trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus fund, sources said o n Wednesday, ending an era in which the former Enron wunderkind defined the high-risk, big . John Arnold - Centaurus Advisors - Insider Monkey The listings let him see that the same cards were sold at different prices in different parts of the countrywhich presented an opportunity for arbitrage. He is unapologetic about having worked at Enron, and he can be defensive about the moral standing of Wall Street in the public mind. John Arnold, the billionaire manager of the Houston hedge fund Centaurus Advisors, told investors and employees Tuesday that he plans to retire, according to people familiar with the . [23] Arnold has also given to The City Fund, an organization focused on growing the number of charter schools in the USA, and its political arm, Public School Allies. It was just a way for us to just all be under one umbrella, and everybody does what he or she needs to do in furtherance of one mission. Theres little evidence to prove how necessary or helpful many of the accepted norms in psychedelic-assisted therapy areand some could even harm patients. Far from simple charity, thats a recipe for plutocracy. [30][31], In 2013, the Arnolds donated $10 million as a private donation to the National Head Start Association after the United States federal government shutdown of 2013 had closed the pre-K Head Start programs. Luce's career in natural-gas storage includes leading roles with energy and utility company Sempra Energy and with NGS Energy, a developer backed by billionaire energy trader John Arnold's Centaurus Advisors hedge fund. We are Centaurus. 1. . Laura and John Arnold | Arnold Ventures The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Mr. Arnold serves on the boards of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an investor-led venture capital firm dedicated to funding transformational technologies that will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions; Civica, Inc., a nonprofit generic pharmaceutical company; and The City Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting new governance models in K-12 education. We are able to use resources in another structure. Donate today to assist in promoting the principles of individual liberty in America. John Arnold shocked the hedge fund world in 2012 when, at just 38 years old, he announced he would no longer manage other people's money. [emphasis added]. Having spent more than a decade picking apart nutrition science, Taubes soon found himself cofounding an organization with a substantial grant from the Arnold Foundation, to rebuild the study of obesity from the ground up. Denis Calabrese, the Arnold Foundations president, says they dont expect immediate results. George Soros, Soros Fund Management - $1.1 billion. Laura tells me she sees her husbands appetite for riskan appetite she says she sharesas the most obvious link between his approach to trading and philanthropy. 2023 Cond Nast. Republished Believing that transparent markets empower businesses, economies, and communities, Natural Gas Intelligence (NGI) provides natural gas price transparency and key news, insights and data for the North American energy markets. ), The backlash against Teicholz also furnished one of the few occasions when anyone has raised an eyebrow at the Arnolds funding of science critics. Consent Several other Houston area billionaires made their money during a record year for oil and gas, such as George Bishop, who. Laura and John Arnold, co-founders and co-chairs of Arnold Ventures. And though the fund bounced back the next year, tighter regulations on trading and a far less volatile marketthanks to a growing supply of natural gas from shale rockmade it unlikely that Arnold would again see the astonishing returns of only a few years earlier. On the top of that list was the energy trading legend that is John Arnold. A number of the Arnolds reform efforts have focused on fixing nutrition science. But as a practical matter, we grew to be so large in terms of our appetite for change in our policy areas that it just became cumbersome to have a C3 group on one side and a C4 group on the other side and having them not really be able to talk to each other. After making millions for Enron, launching his own hedge fund, and becoming a billionaire, John Arnold retired at 38. But as it happens, Nosek is just one of many researchers who have received unsolicited emails from the Arnold Foundation in the past few yearsresearchers involved in similar rounds of soul-searching and critique in their own fields, who have loosely amounted to a movement to fix science. info@naturalgasintel.com The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. Like Tom Steyer, George Soros, and a number of other mega-donors on the Left, John Arnold earned his vast wealth as a hedge fund investor. But if you look at the studies that cant be reproduced and other issues facing science, you start to think: What is evidence? At its peak Centaurus managed some $6 billion before Arnold closed the fund and retired in 2012 at the age of 38, establishing the Laura and John Arnold Foundation with his wifea former oil executivesoon after. Science is built like a building, Arnold says. Just weeks before the federal guidelines were due for an update, Teicholzs blistering report appeared in the prominent medical journal The BMJ, charging that the governments panel of scientists had failed to consider evidence that would have done away with long-held worries about eating saturated fat. Arnold, who specializes in trading natural gas, is the former Enron trader who launched Centaurus in 2002 with the $8 million bonus he received from Enron after making the firm $750 million. John Ioannidis was put in touch with the Arnolds in 2013. This article appears in the February issue. Now everybody says we need replication; we need reproducibility, Ioannidis tells me. The aim was to redo about 50 studies from three prominent psychology journals, to establish an estimate of how often modern psychology turns up false positive results. W hen former Enron trader and billionaire hedge-fund manager John Arnold and his wife, Laura, announced plans to donate 5 percent of their net worth to charity every year, they may have. Subscribe now. So he ran his projects on a shoestring budget, self-financing them with his own earnings from corporate speaking engagements on his research about bias. In a 2014 tweet, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert referred to researchers who had tried and failed to replicate the findings of a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge as shameless little bullies. After Nosek published the results of his reproducibility initiative, four social scientists, including Gilbert, published a critique of the project, claiming, among other things, that it had failed to accurately replicate many of the original studies. For one thing, the problems plaguing scientific research are now increasingly well known. Were not looking to create an organization of safe success, she says. $2.5 billion, according to our most recent tally. But what ought to concern conservatives isnt so much the Arnolds giving as how they give. In the 1830s, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville famously compared Americans penchant for civic association with that of France and England: Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.. And for two years they had been rejected again and againwhich was, by 2011, discouraging but not all that surprising to the 38-year-old scientist. Copyright2023Capital Research Center. Ask a Question. Billionaire John Arnold pushes for charity reform. Trading up: Life lessons with philanthropist John Arnold Qu u c Centaurus Energy ca Arnold, hin ang qun l hn 5 t USD gi tr ti sn, cha bao gi kim c li nhun t hn 50% . What does that say about American philanthropy? [9], After college, he began his career at Enron as an oil analyst, but soon was promoted to assistant trader. Famous in England as a sharp-witted scourge of bad science, Goldacre spent years building up a case that pharmaceutical companies, by refusing to reveal all their data, have essentially deceived the public into paying for worthless therapies. From its ashes, Arnold built his own hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors. In 2016, John Arnold gave $250,000 to an unsuccessful effort to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts, and they poured more than $500,000 into a PAC that helped bolster Governor Charlie . Raymond Dalio, Bridgewater Associates - $780 million. (WIRED wrote about NuSI in issue 22.09). . Theyve given millions of dollars to nonprofits that advocate for charter schools, anti-obesity charities, criminal justice groups aiming to reduce recidivism rates, efforts to reform government pension systems, and conservative think tanks including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Alabama Policy Institute, both of which are members of the center-right State Policy Network. That's what the Arnold Foundation did last week, when it announced that it would be combining its philanthropy and political giving under Arnold Ventures. Arnold was raised in Dallas, Texas, and he was the younger of two sons. In the sciences, one is mostly incentivized to publish journal articles, and especially to publish the sorts of attention-grabbing and controversial articles that get widely cited and picked up by the popular media. John Arnold President Houston, Texas, United States 12 followers Join to view profile Centaurus Capital Experience President - President Centaurus Capital View John's full profile See who. Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researchers work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. (Arnold was not involved in the fraud.) In 2011 Centaurus Energy Master Fund LP was fined $75,000 by the New York Mercantile Exchange for violating position limits in natural gas trading (see Daily GPI, Dec. 28, 2011). Quin es John Arnold, el filntropo que regala programas informticos An associate professor at the University of Virginia, Nosek had made a name for himself in a hot subfield of social psychology, studying peoples unconscious biases. Centaurus's John Arnold: The king of natural gas - Nov. 24, 2009 That same hunger would make large-scale philanthropy far more challenging than he had anticipated. Centaurus Capital LP has committed around $500 million in equity for EOC Partners, according to the . All rights reserved. A new study shows are the four most dangerous words, Arnold wrote on Twitter. [44][45], Arnold has been accused of pushing for pension reform in response to a lawsuit the California state pension system, CalPERS, filed against Enron. For two years he had sent out grant proposals for his software project. John Arnold - Forbes ioneer Ltd has gained a substantial shareholder in Centaurus Capital L.P, which now holds a 7.84% stake with more than 131.5 million shares.This status was reached after US-based Centaurus . John Arnold got his start as a natural gas trader at Enron. He has also served as the Investment Manager for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation since 2011. Episode #386: John Arnold, Arnold Ventures - Why The Greatest Natural Arnold says he wasnt sure if he could match the success hed enjoyed as a futures trader at Enron. John Arnold Is Said to Close Hedge Fund and Return Investor Money Insofar as the LLC form allows donors to treat the categories as just so many rooms for a tiresome accounting game of hide-and-seekthe view that Arnold seems to take herewe may come to regret the growing popularity of that form among those with the largest appetites for change. She is co-founder of Arnold Ventures LLC. Arnold was given $8 million, the biggest payout of all, just days before Enron filed for bankruptcy. All these things that we thought we knewwhen we step back and look at the evidence baseits just not there., Rolling Stone called Arnold a young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generations Koch brothers.. After that Arnold started his own hedge fund, Centaurus Energy, where he became, in the words of one hedge fund competitor, the best trader that ever lived, full stop. Then Arnold had abruptly retired at the ripe age of 38 to focus full time on philanthropy. NGI All News Access. Arnold was described as unapologetic for his success in Enrons final days. 1.800.427.5747 Weve always wanted to change policies. Arnold is a board member of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. In my conversations with Arnold and his grantees, the word incentives seems to come up more than any other. The Arnolds have a multiple-decade timeline to work on problems. Yet the most remarkable thing about the Arnold Foundations research integrity projects is that they already appear to be paying off. [28] From 2010-2013, the Arnolds were heavily involved in the Innocence Project which led to their interest in criminal reform. Andrew Nerlinger - Executive Director - Global Health Security Fund In the War on Bacteria, Its Time to Call in the Phages. John Arnold on Oil and Gas Startups - Digital Wildcatters View Subscription Options Billionaires John and Laura Arnold make Forbes' America's Top Givers The more you read the research, the less you know, Arnold says. Why this billion-dollar foundation is becoming a corporation While the industry as a whole and Centaurus itself have evolved dramatically since our inception, the uncompromising focus of the . Prior A year ago, talk in the Texas energy hub was mostly about defending oil and gas and denouncing renewables, Arnold, 47, said Monday on his Twitter account. In the name of social experimentation, in 2020 Arnold supported Oregon's referendum decriminalizing all drugs, which passed. Arnold Ventures' John Arnold: Now is the Time to Reform Charitable Giving Laws. According to Forbes, Arnold has a personal fortune of $3 billion as of March, putting him at No. Whether all this momentum will lead to transformational change decades from now is impossible to know. Nonprofits are very good at reporting their success rates and citing the science behind their interventions, but dig into their claimsas the Arnolds would try to doand you find that they often omit relevant context or confuse correlation with causation. In 2012, the Arnolds joined the Giving Pledge, an oath made by billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to donate at least half of their wealth. His father, who died when Arnold was 18, was a lawyer. Allen Gibson Salary Infomation 2022 | ERI Economic Research Institute A 2017 interview with Wired magazine characterized him this way: Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researchers work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. Gregg Fleisher, who taught him calculus in high school, recalls an occasion when Arnold instantly solved a math puzzle that had been known to stump PhDs. Arnold has said that the first phase of his life was 100 percent trying to make money and that its now 100 percent trying to do good. As The Wall Street Journal noted, in US history, there may have never been a self-made individual with so much money who devoted himself to philanthropy at such a young age.. [39], Arnold Ventures LLC has invited criticism with its involvement in many controversial areas. Together with Taubes work, Arnold was also reading Ioannidis and Goldacres equally devastating analyses. In Hedge Hogs, a 2013 book about hedge fund traders, Jeff Shankman, another star trader at Enron, is quoted describing Arnold as the most thoughtful, deliberate, and inquisitive person he worked with on the gas floor. In exchange for forgoing those revenues, the government requires a certain standard of public accountability for nonprofits, delivered through public disclosure of annual Form 990 filings and limits on political activities. In Charlottes largest labor demonstration in two decades, about 450 American Airlines pilots protested the slow pace of contract talks near an entrance to Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Monday. . By law, natural gas pipelines had to make much of their information public, and around the time Centaurus was forming, more of that information began to appear online. His next act? And its true that, when it comes to political leanings, they are somewhat hard to pin down. Houston lands 13 billionaires on Forbes global list At the time, his net worth was estimated to be around $3 billion. Of 1,576 researchers who responded to a recent online survey from Nature, more than half agreed there is a significant crisis of reproducibility. But he also stood out for his skepticism. If they wanted to embark on truly transformational change, as their foundation literature states, it wouldnt be enough to properly evaluate this or that education or criminal justice program. McGoverns quip about Enron, a company that hasnt existed in 15 years, was a bit of a potshot. As a pipeline company, Enron had a direct view onto many of the factors that influence gas prices. As co-founders, Laura and John actively engage in the organization's overall direction and daily execution. [25][1] The organization was founded in 2010. Previously, Mr. Arnold founded and was CEO of Centaurus Energy, a multi-billion dollar energy commodity hedge fund.