David Tepper

Born on September 11, 1957 in Pittsburgh, David Alan Tepper is a founder and president of Appaloosa Management, a global hedge fund based in Miami. However, he is in the process of eventually converting the hedge fund into his own family office and as result his AUM has fallen from $13bn (Jun’19) to $3.27bn (Mar’20). He has been awarded rank 3 in the highest earning hedge fund managers in 2018 by Forbes.

In addition to being a hedge fund manager, he is also an owner of Carolina Panthers of the National Football League (NFL) and an unnamed Charlotte franchise in Major League Soccer.

• He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pittsburgh and later did his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982.
• He started his professional career in the treasury department of Republic Steel in Ohio and then was recruited to Keystone Mutual Funds.
• Later on joined Goldman Sachs as a credit analyst and worked there for eight years in various roles where his primary focus was bankruptcies and special situations. He played a major role in survival of Goldman after 1987 market crash. After being passed over for a partner’s role for two years he quit Goldman in 1992.

• After quitting Goldman, he started trading aggressively in his personal account in hopes of raising money to start his own fund. He traded from the desk of a mutual-fund manager and Goldman client.
• This led to the birth of Appaloosa Management in early 1993. The fund invests in fixed income and public equity markets around the world.
• He focused and created wealth through distressed credit in initial years of the fund. However, his focus shifted towards value investing strategy and emphasized on fundamental analysis to identify quality stocks and take concentrated bets. As a result of this roughly 45% of Appaloosa’s portfolio was concentrated on just three stocks. Some of the concentrated bets taken as per the latest portfolio are Amazon, Alibaba group, Alphabet, Facebook.
• Appaloosa boasts an annualized return of over 25% since its beginning and there have been only three instances where the fund was down 20% or more, but it quickly bounced back.

He is a noted philanthropist and has made various donations. One of the biggest donations was of $67mn to Carnegie Mellon, a university in Pittsburg. Tepper School of Business, a part of the Carnegie Mellon University, is named after David Tepper.
Tepper is know for his ability to pull in big returns, his famously infamous reputation as “a man who’s unpolished and proud of it, whose reputation as a candid and at times controversial voice has grown almost as fast as his net worth”.