The yas Man. Jeff Yass built Susquehanna into one of Wall Street's most powerful trading firms. He's also the libertarian billionaire enmeshed with tik tok and betting on Trump by Annie Massa. The commute from Mara A Lago to the Breakers is about ten minutes. In early March, Donald Trump ventured over to his Palm Beach Club's venerable counterparts for an awkward peacemaking mission aimed at the Club for Growth, an anti tax political advocacy group. The year before, the group had shunned Trump, leaving him off the invite list to its annual economic retreat, while welcoming almost every Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswami. But in twenty twenty four, with those candidacies reduced to distant memory, Trump had the spotlight to himself. One attendee who might have been able to explain the club's about face was Jeff Yass, who's among the group's largest backers. A former never Trumper who's recently softened to become an OK Fine might as well be Trumper. Yas has lavished more than sixty million dollars on the organization since twenty sixteen. In keeping with his background as a Wall Street veteran and obsessive poker player, He's organized most of his life around principles of rational bets, always weighing the expected value or potential payoff of everything from securities pricing to fantasy football drafting. The expected value of a second Trump term was starting to look greater than zero. The calculation wasn't insignificant. Yas is the largest individual donor in this presidential election cycle. By day, Yas, who has a personal fortune of forty seven billion dollars, oversees Susquehanna International Group a trading firm burrowed deep in the machinery of modern finance. It's a giant force in options, stocks, energy, bonds, and foreign exchange, and also in more esoteric stuff. It runs of bermudan subsidiary that sells niche insurance for lottery payouts and natural disasters, a Bahamian cryptocurrency operation, and an Irish sports betting group. It backed startups around the world, including in China and Israel, and it arrived relatively early to Bitcoin. Yass purchased some from a U. S. Marshall's auction following their seizure from the illegal marketplace Silk Road. According to a person familiar with the matter, A registered libertarian since nineteen ninety six, Yas has in the past decade spent tens of millions of dollars funding politicians focused on limiting government intervention in every area that matters to him, notably taxes, trading, education, and gaming. He personally champions a controversial overhaul of public schools favored by Betsy Devas, Trump's former secretary of Education, But more recently he's found himself with the center of attention for another reason, his roughly fifteen billion dollar stake in Bytedan, the corporate parent of TikTok. This detail appeared not to be lost on Trump, who during his presidency had attempted to ban the Chinese owned video sharing app with an executive order. As Yas expressed approval of Trump, who was desperately in need of cash for his presidential bid and his deluge of legal bills. The former president has reversed his position on TikTok, declaring after the breaker's event that Americans would go crazy without it. If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zucker Schmuck will double their business. Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last election, doing better. They are a true enemy of the people. A Susquehanna spokesman says Yas and Trump have never discussed TikTok. By early June, days after becoming a convicted felon, Trump was officially on TikTok, gaining one point one million followers in a few hours. A billionaire flip flopping for Trump is nothing new. Yas, a pragmatist more than a Trump ideologue, has kept his views on the former president equivocal and hedged. But Yas is in deep with the Republican camp. His donations to outside spending groups in the twenty twenty four election cycle as of early June, totaling seventy million dollars, almost entirely to conservatives. Some of his money is being deployed to exert his sway in local elections wherever possible, especially in Pennsylvania, where he's the richest man in a swing state with a rare split legislature. A coalition of Pennsylvania nonprofits called All eyes on. Yas, unhappy with his growing influence, started pressuring politicians to reject his money and protesting outside his office and events. After amassing a fortune with approximately no eyes on Yas, He's in New Territory. Yas declined to speak to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, but interviews with more than two dozen of his business associates, former colleagues, friends, and detractors, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, reveals someone who built one of Wall Street's stealthiest yet most powerful trading operations, and whose network of foundations, political donation groups, and companies reaches further than even some of his harshest critics realize. In Yas's idealized version of the future, America looks like a perpetual Texas Holdham tournament with three hundred and thirty three million players, the gambler in the best position at the table and perhaps with the biggest bankroll wins. Yass wrote his undergraduate thesis about the ethics of options trading after growing up in Queens, New York. He'd become a typical socialist minded student at sunny Binghamton in the mid nineteen seventies. As he described himself in a twenty twenty one interview with the Adam Smith Society, he studied economics in math and spent plenty of time playing poker, backgammon, and bridge. Although options trading had been around in some form for centuries Greek olive harvest's Dutch tulip bulbs, the modern incarnation didn't appear until nineteen seventy three, when a new options exchange opened in Chicago. Unlike buying a company's stock, an option is a purer betting tool. An option contract is a wager that the price of something like shares of a company or barrels of oil will rise or fall to a specific price by a certain date. The appeal is that it's cheaper to buy an option than stock for a single company, but it can also be riskier. If the underlying thing doesn't hit a specified price by an appointed date, the option contract can expire worthless. In his college thesis, Yas wrestled with whether this new kind of trading delivered any benefit to society or was effectively a casino. I concluded it should exist. He later said I got a b. Binghamton's economics department was unable to locate a copy of Yas's thesis in an archive. Yes hatched Susquehanna in nineteen eighty seven with a group of college poker buddies Arthur Dantchik, Steve Bloom, Eric Brooks, Andrew Frost, and Joel Greenberg. The company's name refers to the river that runs from New York, where they met, through Pennsylvania, where they started the firm. Susquehanna got into options trading relatively early, and its mathematical approach to what would become a lucrative corner of Wall Street paid off over the ensuing decades. It established itself as a huge player. Whereas investment banks service outside clients and public companies answer to shareholders, Yas and his partners set up a proprietary trading firm where they put their own cash on the table. Its traders would gather every available shred of data and fine tune algorithms to figure out when to buy or sell all kinds of things. Think silver, Swiss franks, crude oil, bitcoin, sugar contracts tied to average temperatures in Sacramento. If you can trade it, Susquehanna will likely name a price The firm operates largely outside the public eye, but there are clues to how much money it generates. Regulatory filings show that a single one of its portfolios covering publicly traded US stocks, was worth almost sixty seven billion dollars at the end of March, and when Susquehanna wins big, the spoils accrue to Yas, the firm's majority owner, and his partners. Dancik also ranks among the world's richest people, with a net worth of eleven billion dollars according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index. Unlike its competitors, which reside in some of the most expensive New York City real estate, Susquehanna located its global headquarters in a squat building in a Philadelphia suburb, more befitting an accountant or a dentist office. Yass still arrives at this office before markets open in New York at nine thirty AM and sits in jeans in a polo shirt in the middle of the trading floor with the rest of his employees rifling poker chips. Every day, he reviews the performance of Susquehanna's various divisions that, in addition to options cover energy bonds, foreign exchange, and virtual assets, and are staffed by roughly three thousand employees. Yas prefers to rely on information from within his own company rather than from external sources, such as Susquehanna's in house meteorologist who helps inform his energy trader's decisions. The point is to leave as little as possible to chance. New hires complete a training program where they learn to think about markets through the lens of poker and probabilities. They play hand after hand of Texas hold'em in a game room on the seventh floor equipped with blue felt tables and decks of cards. Three World Series of Poker bracelet winners work for Susquehanna. Brooks, a co founder, won the Seven Card stud Championship in two thousand and eight. For big sporting events such as the Kentucky Derby, Yas runs contests with thousands of dollars in prizes. In twenty twenty three, when the Philadelphia Eagles were in the Super Bowl, he flew fifty rounds selected employees to Arizona for the game. On at least one occasion. Yes, a friend of Eagles owner Jeff Lury has tried to impart a few probabilistic principles concerning when they should attempt to run the ball on fourth down. According to a person familiar with the matter, and when Todd Simkin, an associate director at Susquehanna, was preparing for an appearance on Jeopardy yas came into his office for a pep talk of sorts, he said, Todd, nobody cares if you know anything about American history, But if you screw up the betting on the final jeopardy in daily doubles, don't even bother coming back, Simkin told the Knowledge Project podcast. Yes summed up his worldview in a two thousand and eight Barons led roundtable. All decisions in business or life have some element of optionality, he said. If you aren't an expert on option theory, it's very difficult to be an expert in decision making, which helps explain why by the early two thousands, he and his colleagues had realized that keeping all their investments centered on the US markets carried its own kind of risk. They opened an outpost in Beijing and began investing in early stage companies in the booming Chinese economy, resulting in what would become one of Susquehanna's most precient wagers, a little known tech company called Byte Dance. Today, Susquehanna owns an estimated fifteen percent of the company, worth more than thirty billion dollars. Yas's Byte Dance stake makes up about one third of his net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index. Earlier this year, as US concern about TikTok's Chinese ownership and whether it posed a national security risk intensified, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would force Byte Dance as Chinese owners to divest from TikTok's US arm or else the app would be banned. Yas meanwhile was re evaluating his position on the politicians he was backing. He'd given Club for Growth ten million dollars the prior year, when the super pac was paying for attack ads against Trump. As Trump became the presumptive nominee, Yass seemed to engage in some Susquehanna style Baysian updating, that is, recalculating the probabilities as new information came to light. At the breakers, Yas greeted Trump and thanked him for supporting candidates favorable to his pet issue education in Texas, According to a spokesman for Yass. In the following weeks, Trump reversed his position on TikTok, and Yas penned a Wall Street Journal op ed supporting Trump over President Joe Biden when it came to education. It was with a hedge. I've never given financial support to mister Trump's campaign, and I don't plan to, but it was something of a moot point, since he'd sent millions to Club for Growth's super pac this year, and the group's rapprochement with Trump was underway. With Yas's name increasingly accompanying Trump's in headlines, an entire subgenre of TikTok videos emerged to explain the mysterious Pennsylvania financier one called Yas who doesn't have a verified TikTok account, the billionaire whose saving tik tok. Others were more suspicious. You using this app listen up, said one user in a post hashtagged Yasification. We all deserve to know who Jeff Yass is. We'll be right back in a moment with the yas Man. Welcome back to the yas Man. When Yas was thirteen. His father, Gerald, a certified public accountant, was working at an early computer services company called data Tab. A couple of years earlier, Yas had persuaded his dad to buy him ten shares of Campbell soup company, which made his favorites Wants and TV Dinners, but the stock didn't move much. Now Data Tab was going public, and the company gave its employees warrants, an instrument akin to options, which Gerald explained to his son. For Jeff, the idea that you could bet relatively little for the chance to win a lot held more allure than a stock. You could buy something at a dollar and have it go to ten if you got it right, Yas said at the Maren's Led roundtable years later, that really excited me. After graduating from Binghamton in nineteen seventy nine, Yas interviewed at an investment firm where he realized he was thinking differently about trading than even the most senior financiers. During the interview, according to an account in The New Market Wizards, a book by Jack Schweger, he started telling the company's head of options what he thought was crucial to earning money in derivatives, but the executive interrupted him, asking for IBM's high and low stock price for the year. Yas replied with a guess, adding, if you're wasting your time thinking about that, you're on the wrong track completely. He didn't get the job. Instead, he moved to Las Vegas with Dancik to play poker professionally. At the time, authors including David Sklansky were popularizing a mathematical approach to the game, applying probabilities to assess when and how much to wager. Yas and Dancik spent days at separate tables, then convened in the evening to talk through their choices to bet, check, or fold. They could tell that the skill level of their opponents mattered. Yass concluded that an eight player Vegas poker game typically broke down to three professionals, three semi pros, and two tourists. According to his interview with Schweger, your odds of winning depended on where you fell along that spectrum. Yass estimated that he won about fifty five percent of the time on average. He has a careful, conservative poker style, according to people who've played against him more recently. In his early twenties, Yass published a paper in The Gambling Times about why the average better loses money at the horse track, noting that trainers, owners, and professional handicappers were all wagering with superior information. As he put it in a twenty twenty bet the Process podcast interview, all of sports betting, all of playing poker, and all of options trading is making sure your betting against someone you're smarter than. Yas and his Binghamton friends set up a betting syndicate called Ramjack, named after Kurt Vonnegut's fictional mega conglomerate. They bet on dog races, horse races, and a ball sport called Hylai. A horse track in Chicago banned Yas's group in nineteen eighty five after they identified a loophole in a certain contest called the super Bet that allowed them to win about six hundred thousand dollars on a sixty thousand dollars bet. By then, Yas was already trading options. He decided that doing it at scale would be the most lucrative path forward, and he got the backing to do it from his father, an israel Englander, founder of the hedge fund Millennium Management who helped him secure a seat on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. From there, he enlisted his buddies and created the firm that became Susquehanna. Its arrival couldn't have been better timed. In an early coup, they placed positions anticipating declining stock prices prior to what would become the Black Monday Crash, bringing in thirty million dollars in its first year, according to The Washington Post. Yet Yass felt conflicted after the nineteen eighty seven crash. A strategy Susquehanna was using called program trading, an early iteration of the algorithmic trading that dominates today's markets, was blamed for increasing uncertainty during a moment of market turmoil. As Yas grappled with the ethics of earning money this way, a friend helped him secure a five minute phone call with Milton Friedman, the high priest of free markets, to get a second opinion. When Yas was younger, he explained in the Adam Smith Society interview, he'd distrusted financial middleman, but after gobbling up the economist's works, he'd begun to see those intermediaries as paving the way for human progress. His conclusion after the conversation with Friedman, I should have no moral qualms about doing it, so we kept on doing it. Susquehanna began hiring recruits straight out of college and taught them principles from getting the best of it Sklansky's nineteen eighty two Guide to Mathematics and Gambling. Yas cultivated loyalty by offering free trips, putting up staff in their plus ones at the brand new Renaissance themed Venetian in Las Vegas around the time of the dot com boom. In other years, Susquehanna sent employees on long weekends to Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, Florida, staggering departure dates so a portion of the team was always back at work to monitor the markets and if the vacations didn't inspire fealty. Susquehanna also had legendary non competes, former staffers say. A spokesman for the firm says its non competes are in line with industry standards. In September two thousand, Yas and his partners were eating lunch at the office when an employee burst in with the news that Goldman Sachs had just bought out one of Susquehanna's big rivals, spear Leeds and Kellogg, for six point five billion dollars. Assuming Susquehanna was similarly valuable, its partners were all billionaires on paper. Although this realization may have been affirming for the co founders, its traders weren't uniformly happy. Markets had gone wild, and not everyone felt they'd been compensated as generously as they deserved. One of the most notable ruptures in the company's history happened that year, when a group of employees left to create what would become one of its biggest rivals, Jane Street Group, Adopting some of the same principles as Susquehanna's. Jane Street runs on game theory, math puzzles, and a staff of quants often hired fresh from college. Lately, it's become best known for being the former employer of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman. Freed Important executives at many of its direct competitors, including Old Mission Capital, Hap Trading, Marathon Trading, Hard Eight Trading, and Citadel Securities, got their start at Susquehanna. Yes kept on gaining power and influence, getting in early as technology changed and rules loosened. He was there when cryptocurrency markets went from a single obscure token called bitcoin two thousands of instruments worth billions of dollars, and when a twenty eighteen Supreme Court ruling ended a federal ban on sports gambling, paving the way for state by state legalization. Doug, one of his four children, became an early employee of Susquehanna's sports betting arm in Ireland, which started in twenty sixteen. By twenty eighteen, Susquehanna was buying and selling millions of dollars worth of virtual assets, according to a New York Times story that year. As for Yas's first love, options, that market changed too. Once confined to physical exchange floors, options trading is now as easy as opening an account on robin hood markets, Weebel Financial e Toro, a Susquehanna backed Israeli trading app Meme. Stock ring leaders such as Roaring Kitty share snapshots of Yolo options trades. While more traditional contracts have expirations weeks or months out, newer options offer a shorter term, rush, expiring in less than a day. Susquehanna is now one of the three largest middlemen for retail options trades, behind Citadel Securities and IMC. Of course, every day investors who take a crack at options often wind up like the poker table tourists Yes identified early in his career. Studies show that those traders, on average lose money, not knowing that they're effectively wandering from a basement seven card stud game to a table of World series of poker bracelet holders. Easy access makes options markets appear deceptively simple to a regular speculator, but the pros on the other side are the ones coming out ahead. They may bet more money than they can afford to lose, which is what regulators always worry about. Yes said in the Adam Smith Society interview. Of course that can happen, but that's what happens in a free society. He added, it comes down to do you believe in liberty or not. Yas is sixty five, his friends and business associates often describe him in terms of what he doesn't do. He doesn't wear a flashy watch. He doesn't opine about the direction of the S and P five hundred on television. He doesn't drive a Bentley blab on stage at the biggest conferences, spirit himself away on a megaot or by luxury penthouses overlooking Central Park. Another thing Yas doesn't do, at least to the extent possible, is pay more taxes than absolutely necessary. The unassuming Susquehanna HQ in Balakinwood long ago relocated from Philadelphia, avoiding a city specific tax. A pro Publica investigation found that Yas paid an average federal income tax rate far below what his Wall Street peers did, saving at least one billion dollars over six years. Yas's firm said the report contained numerous misstatements without specifying any alleged error. According to the outlet, and Susquehanna repeatedly fought the Internal Revenue Service in court, including over a sixty million dollar tax bill from twenty twelve, a case in which the US argues that a Susquehanna entity designed some trades solely to capture US tax benefits. According to court filings, Yas is unabashed about his distaste for wealth redistribution. America is approaching a point where no one's hungry, no one's cold, no one doesn't have some basic health insurance. He told the Adam Smith Society, what's the difference between a billionaire and a guy that's making one hundred thousand dollars a year. They're both at home watching Netflix. They're both on their iPhones. He and his partners fund a vast network of political donor groups and libertarian free market think tanks, including the Cato Institute, where Yas sat on the board for decades and to which the Susquehanna Foundation gave six million dollars in twenty twenty one. Through twenty twenty two, Cato has published commentary denouncing the TikTok ban entwined with taxes. Yas's other big project is reforming public education, a focus inspired by another encounter with his free market hero, Freedman. Yass says that in the nineteen nineties he asked the Nobel Laureate the best way to spend philanthropic money. Friedman suggested picking up the mantle of school choice, an approach to overhauling education. Today, the school choice movement encompasses a variety of alternatives to assigned to public schools, including charter schools, magnet schools, tuition tax credits, and school vouchers. Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, is a major donor to charter schools. Freedman promoted in particular the modern concept of school vouchers, or ways of routing public funds to parents who can use the money to send their children to a school of their choosing, including private or religious schools. Yas favors vouchers, too, arguing that failing government schools entrapped students and that tax dollars would be better spent empowering parents to decide where to en educate their offspring. You're not treated like a customer, Yes, said of public schools at an event for an educational award, the Yas Prize that he and his wife Jeanine created. You're a slave. Detractors say that such programs leave public schools to languish, particularly in rural areas, and that boucher programs can effectively re route public funds to private schools that can exclude students based on socioeconomic status, English proficiency, disciplinary record, or LGBTQ traits. This cause appeals to a small but highly engaged group with almost unlimited resources like Jeff Yass, Betsy de Vas, and Charles Koch, says Josh Cowan, author of The Privateers, How billionaires created a culture war and sold school vouchers. Supporting school voucher programs can also be a shrewd financial maneuver. In Pennsylvania, the tax credits for donating to eligible scholarship funds can amount to as much as ninety percent of the gift. Tax experts have raised concerns about donor's double dipping by combining state credits with federal deductions to recoup a tax free profit on the original contribution. One thing is clear, Pennsylvania's tax credits are well known to Yas and his colleagues, who've donated tens of millions of dollars for more than a decade. Since twenty thirteen, four entities tied to Susquehann executives Yas's Philadelphia Trading, Greenberg's JKG Florida Business, Danchik's RTE, and managing director Mark Dooley's MLD Trading collected a total of more than sixty one million dollars in tax credits under two Pennsylvania school voucher programs. According to state data, Yas back's political candidates who favor voucher programs, both inside and outside Pennsylvania. In Kentucky, he gave six million dollars last year to a Rand Paul affiliated group that supported Republican gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron. In Texas, he made a six million dollar do nation to pro voucher Governor Greg Abbott, whose campaign called it the largest political gift in the state's history. Through a spokesman, Yas says he plans to support pro school choice candidates in any state. Jessica Levin, litigation director at the Education Law Center, says the contributions bear scrutiny. You have to ask yourself, why are some of the wealthiest people promoting these programs. If there's one place where Yas is prone to tilting a poker term for digging in, sometimes emotionally, despite losses, it could be in his political giving. In twenty ten, he and his co founders back to failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial bid by Anthony Hardy Williams. Cameron lost last year. In Kentucky, there have been other losses, including a primary challenger to Pennsylvania Representative Summerly. Despite Yas funded attack ads casting the incumbent as insufficiently democratic. Carolyn Carluccio, a Republican contender for Pennsylvania Supreme Court, also failed in her race last year despite about four million dollars in funding from groups tied to Yas. In Yas's home state, activists accuse him of trying to eviscerate public schools, so much so that when Abbod Elementary, an ABC comedy about a fictional Philadelphia public school, featured a plot line about charter schools last year, some viewers interpreted it as a swipe at Yas. In early June, when Jay Z's company Rock Nation announced a campaign supporting vouchers for Philadelphia's low income students, critics quickly invoked Yas's role in the state's school choice skirmish. A patchwork quilt of groups protesting Yas's influence has been stitched together in the past three years in Pennsylvania. Jewish Voice for Peace arranged one rally in twenty twenty one in which protesters assembled at Susquehanna headquarters, only to discover that they could simply enter the building unhindered by security. Folks just walked inside, says Ariel Clagsbrunn, a deputy camp director of the Action Center on Race and Economy who attended the event. It spoke to how little attention he's gotten for someone who has such an increasingly large role in politics. The protesters staged to sit in, demanding a discussion with Yas, until security intervened. The following year, protesters found the driveway blocked off. Yas had arranged for a food truck to be waiting outside with donuts, a move Clagsbourne interprets as a light troll. The activists huddled to discuss whether it would be ethical to accept the donuts. They decided it was not. Options trading is about managing uncertainty, and for Yas, TikTok's fate is nothing but uncertain. Under the bill Biden signed into law, TikTok's US arm needs to be sold by early twenty twenty five or else face a ban. It could find a buyer, which theoretically could be a payday for Yas, but with so many variables, it's a wildly complicated prospect. The Chinese government would ne need to approve a divestiture, which could cost a suitor forty billion dollars or more In another version of events, a legal challenge Bye Dance filed in which the company says divesting is simply not possible, not commercially, not technologically, not legally, could result in repeated delays of the ban. If Trump is elected this fall, he could play a role in determining TikTok's fate first, though Trump needs all the financial help he can muster. In recent months, his campaign's fundraising badly trailed Biden's, though his felony conviction boosted donations. Wall Street and Silicon Valley doyennes, who once distance themselves from Trump, have lined up behind him, attracted by the prospect of lower taxes and looser regulation. Yas and Trump might make odd bedfellows. The former has a mind like a calculator, according to a former Yas colleague, and Trump's is more like a random number generator. But Trump can't risk alienating anyone with money and has apparently made up his mind that Trump better suits his purposes as the twenty twenty four election approaches. Yas's other obsession is loosening the rules on sports betting, even though some forecasts estimated the industry's volumes would reach about two hundred and fifty billion dollars in a mature market. Yas posited at a twenty twenty penel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that it could be much more. If the sports betting world goes the way options exchanges and stock exchanges went, with faster technology and low costs to trade, market volume could easily go to one trillion dollars, he said. Yas is steering Susquehanna into prediction markets, a niche where traders bet on all kinds of eventualities in politics, economics, and pop culture. These markets are still very small, approved in the US in minor and academic contexts. The federal agency that regulates derivatives has cracked down on this nascent industry, fearful political betting can threaten election in n integrity. In twenty twenty, Susquehanna used licensed platforms in the UK to take the other side of bets as much as one hundred million dollars on the original Biden versus Trump election. This year, Susquehanna started a trading desk on Kulshe, a rare regulated prediction market in the US where users can wager on questions like how high will bitcoin go this month. How many weeks will Taylor Swift's new album spend at number one on the charts. How many Biden Trump debates will happen before the election. Will the US get rid of TikTok by May twenty twenty five. Yas's firm is the first big trader there, with Tom Maloney, David Voriakos, and Catherine Burton.

The yas Man. Jeff Yass built Susquehanna into one of Wall Street's most powerful trading firms. He's also the libertarian billionaire enmeshed with tik tok and betting on Trump by Annie Massa. The commute from Mara A Lago to the Breakers is about ten minutes. In early March, Donald Trump ventured over to his Palm Beach Club's venerable counterparts for an awkward peacemaking mission aimed at the Club for Growth, an anti tax political advocacy group. The year before, the group had shunned Trump, leaving him off the invite list to its annual economic retreat, while welcoming almost every Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswami. But in twenty twenty four, with those candidacies reduced to distant memory, Trump had the spotlight to himself. One attendee who might have been able to explain the club's about face was Jeff Yass, who's among the group's largest backers. A former never Trumper who's recently softened to become an OK Fine might as well be Trumper. Yas has lavished more than sixty million dollars on the organization since twenty sixteen. In keeping with his background as a Wall Street veteran and obsessive poker player, He's organized most of his life around principles of rational bets, always weighing the expected value or potential payoff of everything from securities pricing to fantasy football drafting. The expected value of a second Trump term was starting to look greater than zero. The calculation wasn't insignificant. Yas is the largest individual donor in this presidential election cycle. By day, Yas, who has a personal fortune of forty seven billion dollars, oversees Susquehanna International Group a trading firm burrowed deep in the machinery of modern finance. It's a giant force in options, stocks, energy, bonds, and foreign exchange, and also in more esoteric stuff. It runs of bermudan subsidiary that sells niche insurance for lottery payouts and natural disasters, a Bahamian cryptocurrency operation, and an Irish sports betting group. It backed startups around the world, including in China and Israel, and it arrived relatively early to Bitcoin. Yass purchased some from a U. S. Marshall's auction following their seizure from the illegal marketplace Silk Road. According to a person familiar with the matter, A registered libertarian since nineteen ninety six, Yas has in the past decade spent tens of millions of dollars funding politicians focused on limiting government intervention in every area that matters to him, notably taxes, trading, education, and gaming. He personally champions a controversial overhaul of public schools favored by Betsy Devas, Trump's former secretary of Education, But more recently he's found himself with the center of attention for another reason, his roughly fifteen billion dollar stake in Bytedan, the corporate parent of TikTok. This detail appeared not to be lost on Trump, who during his presidency had attempted to ban the Chinese owned video sharing app with an executive order. As Yas expressed approval of Trump, who was desperately in need of cash for his presidential bid and his deluge of legal bills. The former president has reversed his position on TikTok, declaring after the breaker's event that Americans would go crazy without it. If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zucker Schmuck will double their business. Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last election, doing better. They are a true enemy of the people. A Susquehanna spokesman says Yas and Trump have never discussed TikTok. By early June, days after becoming a convicted felon, Trump was officially on TikTok, gaining one point one million followers in a few hours. A billionaire flip flopping for Trump is nothing new. Yas, a pragmatist more than a Trump ideologue, has kept his views on the former president equivocal and hedged. But Yas is in deep with the Republican camp. His donations to outside spending groups in the twenty twenty four election cycle as of early June, totaling seventy million dollars, almost entirely to conservatives. Some of his money is being deployed to exert his sway in local elections wherever possible, especially in Pennsylvania, where he's the richest man in a swing state with a rare split legislature. A coalition of Pennsylvania nonprofits called All eyes on. Yas, unhappy with his growing influence, started pressuring politicians to reject his money and protesting outside his office and events. After amassing a fortune with approximately no eyes on Yas, He's in New Territory. Yas declined to speak to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, but interviews with more than two dozen of his business associates, former colleagues, friends, and detractors, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, reveals someone who built one of Wall Street's stealthiest yet most powerful trading operations, and whose network of foundations, political donation groups, and companies reaches further than even some of his harshest critics realize. In Yas's idealized version of the future, America looks like a perpetual Texas Holdham tournament with three hundred and thirty three million players, the gambler in the best position at the table and perhaps with the biggest bankroll wins. Yass wrote his undergraduate thesis about the ethics of options trading after growing up in Queens, New York. He'd become a typical socialist minded student at sunny Binghamton in the mid nineteen seventies. As he described himself in a twenty twenty one interview with the Adam Smith Society, he studied economics in math and spent plenty of time playing poker, backgammon, and bridge. Although options trading had been around in some form for centuries Greek olive harvest's Dutch tulip bulbs, the modern incarnation didn't appear until nineteen seventy three, when a new options exchange opened in Chicago. Unlike buying a company's stock, an option is a purer betting tool. An option contract is a wager that the price of something like shares of a company or barrels of oil will rise or fall to a specific price by a certain date. The appeal is that it's cheaper to buy an option than stock for a single company, but it can also be riskier. If the underlying thing doesn't hit a specified price by an appointed date, the option contract can expire worthless. In his college thesis, Yas wrestled with whether this new kind of trading delivered any benefit to society or was effectively a casino. I concluded it should exist. He later said I got a b. Binghamton's economics department was unable to locate a copy of Yas's thesis in an archive. Yes hatched Susquehanna in nineteen eighty seven with a group of college poker buddies Arthur Dantchik, Steve Bloom, Eric Brooks, Andrew Frost, and Joel Greenberg. The company's name refers to the river that runs from New York, where they met, through Pennsylvania, where they started the firm. Susquehanna got into options trading relatively early, and its mathematical approach to what would become a lucrative corner of Wall Street paid off over the ensuing decades. It established itself as a huge player. Whereas investment banks service outside clients and public companies answer to shareholders, Yas and his partners set up a proprietary trading firm where they put their own cash on the table. Its traders would gather every available shred of data and fine tune algorithms to figure out when to buy or sell all kinds of things. Think silver, Swiss franks, crude oil, bitcoin, sugar contracts tied to average temperatures in Sacramento. If you can trade it, Susquehanna will likely name a price The firm operates largely outside the public eye, but there are clues to how much money it generates. Regulatory filings show that a single one of its portfolios covering publicly traded US stocks, was worth almost sixty seven billion dollars at the end of March, and when Susquehanna wins big, the spoils accrue to Yas, the firm's majority owner, and his partners. Dancik also ranks among the world's richest people, with a net worth of eleven billion dollars according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index. Unlike its competitors, which reside in some of the most expensive New York City real estate, Susquehanna located its global headquarters in a squat building in a Philadelphia suburb, more befitting an accountant or a dentist office. Yass still arrives at this office before markets open in New York at nine thirty AM and sits in jeans in a polo shirt in the middle of the trading floor with the rest of his employees rifling poker chips. Every day, he reviews the performance of Susquehanna's various divisions that, in addition to options cover energy bonds, foreign exchange, and virtual assets, and are staffed by roughly three thousand employees. Yas prefers to rely on information from within his own company rather than from external sources, such as Susquehanna's in house meteorologist who helps inform his energy trader's decisions. The point is to leave as little as possible to chance. New hires complete a training program where they learn to think about markets through the lens of poker and probabilities. They play hand after hand of Texas hold'em in a game room on the seventh floor equipped with blue felt tables and decks of cards. Three World Series of Poker bracelet winners work for Susquehanna. Brooks, a co founder, won the Seven Card stud Championship in two thousand and eight. For big sporting events such as the Kentucky Derby, Yas runs contests with thousands of dollars in prizes. In twenty twenty three, when the Philadelphia Eagles were in the Super Bowl, he flew fifty rounds selected employees to Arizona for the game. On at least one occasion. Yes, a friend of Eagles owner Jeff Lury has tried to impart a few probabilistic principles concerning when they should attempt to run the ball on fourth down. According to a person familiar with the matter, and when Todd Simkin, an associate director at Susquehanna, was preparing for an appearance on Jeopardy yas came into his office for a pep talk of sorts, he said, Todd, nobody cares if you know anything about American history, But if you screw up the betting on the final jeopardy in daily doubles, don't even bother coming back, Simkin told the Knowledge Project podcast. Yes summed up his worldview in a two thousand and eight Barons led roundtable. All decisions in business or life have some element of optionality, he said. If you aren't an expert on option theory, it's very difficult to be an expert in decision making, which helps explain why by the early two thousands, he and his colleagues had realized that keeping all their investments centered on the US markets carried its own kind of risk. They opened an outpost in Beijing and began investing in early stage companies in the booming Chinese economy, resulting in what would become one of Susquehanna's most precient wagers, a little known tech company called Byte Dance. Today, Susquehanna owns an estimated fifteen percent of the company, worth more than thirty billion dollars. Yas's Byte Dance stake makes up about one third of his net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index. Earlier this year, as US concern about TikTok's Chinese ownership and whether it posed a national security risk intensified, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would force Byte Dance as Chinese owners to divest from TikTok's US arm or else the app would be banned. Yas meanwhile was re evaluating his position on the politicians he was backing. He'd given Club for Growth ten million dollars the prior year, when the super pac was paying for attack ads against Trump. As Trump became the presumptive nominee, Yass seemed to engage in some Susquehanna style Baysian updating, that is, recalculating the probabilities as new information came to light. At the breakers, Yas greeted Trump and thanked him for supporting candidates favorable to his pet issue education in Texas, According to a spokesman for Yass. In the following weeks, Trump reversed his position on TikTok, and Yas penned a Wall Street Journal op ed supporting Trump over President Joe Biden when it came to education. It was with a hedge. I've never given financial support to mister Trump's campaign, and I don't plan to, but it was something of a moot point, since he'd sent millions to Club for Growth's super pac this year, and the group's rapprochement with Trump was underway. With Yas's name increasingly accompanying Trump's in headlines, an entire subgenre of TikTok videos emerged to explain the mysterious Pennsylvania financier one called Yas who doesn't have a verified TikTok account, the billionaire whose saving tik tok. Others were more suspicious. You using this app listen up, said one user in a post hashtagged Yasification. We all deserve to know who Jeff Yass is. We'll be right back in a moment with the yas Man. Welcome back to the yas Man. When Yas was thirteen. His father, Gerald, a certified public accountant, was working at an early computer services company called data Tab. A couple of years earlier, Yas had persuaded his dad to buy him ten shares of Campbell soup company, which made his favorites Wants and TV Dinners, but the stock didn't move much. Now Data Tab was going public, and the company gave its employees warrants, an instrument akin to options, which Gerald explained to his son. For Jeff, the idea that you could bet relatively little for the chance to win a lot held more allure than a stock. You could buy something at a dollar and have it go to ten if you got it right, Yas said at the Maren's Led roundtable years later, that really excited me. After graduating from Binghamton in nineteen seventy nine, Yas interviewed at an investment firm where he realized he was thinking differently about trading than even the most senior financiers. During the interview, according to an account in The New Market Wizards, a book by Jack Schweger, he started telling the company's head of options what he thought was crucial to earning money in derivatives, but the executive interrupted him, asking for IBM's high and low stock price for the year. Yas replied with a guess, adding, if you're wasting your time thinking about that, you're on the wrong track completely. He didn't get the job. Instead, he moved to Las Vegas with Dancik to play poker professionally. At the time, authors including David Sklansky were popularizing a mathematical approach to the game, applying probabilities to assess when and how much to wager. Yas and Dancik spent days at separate tables, then convened in the evening to talk through their choices to bet, check, or fold. They could tell that the skill level of their opponents mattered. Yass concluded that an eight player Vegas poker game typically broke down to three professionals, three semi pros, and two tourists. According to his interview with Schweger, your odds of winning depended on where you fell along that spectrum. Yass estimated that he won about fifty five percent of the time on average. He has a careful, conservative poker style, according to people who've played against him more recently. In his early twenties, Yass published a paper in The Gambling Times about why the average better loses money at the horse track, noting that trainers, owners, and professional handicappers were all wagering with superior information. As he put it in a twenty twenty bet the Process podcast interview, all of sports betting, all of playing poker, and all of options trading is making sure your betting against someone you're smarter than. Yas and his Binghamton friends set up a betting syndicate called Ramjack, named after Kurt Vonnegut's fictional mega conglomerate. They bet on dog races, horse races, and a ball sport called Hylai. A horse track in Chicago banned Yas's group in nineteen eighty five after they identified a loophole in a certain contest called the super Bet that allowed them to win about six hundred thousand dollars on a sixty thousand dollars bet. By then, Yas was already trading options. He decided that doing it at scale would be the most lucrative path forward, and he got the backing to do it from his father, an israel Englander, founder of the hedge fund Millennium Management who helped him secure a seat on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. From there, he enlisted his buddies and created the firm that became Susquehanna. Its arrival couldn't have been better timed. In an early coup, they placed positions anticipating declining stock prices prior to what would become the Black Monday Crash, bringing in thirty million dollars in its first year, according to The Washington Post. Yet Yass felt conflicted after the nineteen eighty seven crash. A strategy Susquehanna was using called program trading, an early iteration of the algorithmic trading that dominates today's markets, was blamed for increasing uncertainty during a moment of market turmoil. As Yas grappled with the ethics of earning money this way, a friend helped him secure a five minute phone call with Milton Friedman, the high priest of free markets, to get a second opinion. When Yas was younger, he explained in the Adam Smith Society interview, he'd distrusted financial middleman, but after gobbling up the economist's works, he'd begun to see those intermediaries as paving the way for human progress. His conclusion after the conversation with Friedman, I should have no moral qualms about doing it, so we kept on doing it. Susquehanna began hiring recruits straight out of college and taught them principles from getting the best of it Sklansky's nineteen eighty two Guide to Mathematics and Gambling. Yas cultivated loyalty by offering free trips, putting up staff in their plus ones at the brand new Renaissance themed Venetian in Las Vegas around the time of the dot com boom. In other years, Susquehanna sent employees on long weekends to Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, Florida, staggering departure dates so a portion of the team was always back at work to monitor the markets and if the vacations didn't inspire fealty. Susquehanna also had legendary non competes, former staffers say. A spokesman for the firm says its non competes are in line with industry standards. In September two thousand, Yas and his partners were eating lunch at the office when an employee burst in with the news that Goldman Sachs had just bought out one of Susquehanna's big rivals, spear Leeds and Kellogg, for six point five billion dollars. Assuming Susquehanna was similarly valuable, its partners were all billionaires on paper. Although this realization may have been affirming for the co founders, its traders weren't uniformly happy. Markets had gone wild, and not everyone felt they'd been compensated as generously as they deserved. One of the most notable ruptures in the company's history happened that year, when a group of employees left to create what would become one of its biggest rivals, Jane Street Group, Adopting some of the same principles as Susquehanna's. Jane Street runs on game theory, math puzzles, and a staff of quants often hired fresh from college. Lately, it's become best known for being the former employer of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman. Freed Important executives at many of its direct competitors, including Old Mission Capital, Hap Trading, Marathon Trading, Hard Eight Trading, and Citadel Securities, got their start at Susquehanna. Yes kept on gaining power and influence, getting in early as technology changed and rules loosened. He was there when cryptocurrency markets went from a single obscure token called bitcoin two thousands of instruments worth billions of dollars, and when a twenty eighteen Supreme Court ruling ended a federal ban on sports gambling, paving the way for state by state legalization. Doug, one of his four children, became an early employee of Susquehanna's sports betting arm in Ireland, which started in twenty sixteen. By twenty eighteen, Susquehanna was buying and selling millions of dollars worth of virtual assets, according to a New York Times story that year. As for Yas's first love, options, that market changed too. Once confined to physical exchange floors, options trading is now as easy as opening an account on robin hood markets, Weebel Financial e Toro, a Susquehanna backed Israeli trading app Meme. Stock ring leaders such as Roaring Kitty share snapshots of Yolo options trades. While more traditional contracts have expirations weeks or months out, newer options offer a shorter term, rush, expiring in less than a day. Susquehanna is now one of the three largest middlemen for retail options trades, behind Citadel Securities and IMC. Of course, every day investors who take a crack at options often wind up like the poker table tourists Yes identified early in his career. Studies show that those traders, on average lose money, not knowing that they're effectively wandering from a basement seven card stud game to a table of World series of poker bracelet holders. Easy access makes options markets appear deceptively simple to a regular speculator, but the pros on the other side are the ones coming out ahead. They may bet more money than they can afford to lose, which is what regulators always worry about. Yes said in the Adam Smith Society interview. Of course that can happen, but that's what happens in a free society. He added, it comes down to do you believe in liberty or not. Yas is sixty five, his friends and business associates often describe him in terms of what he doesn't do. He doesn't wear a flashy watch. He doesn't opine about the direction of the S and P five hundred on television. He doesn't drive a Bentley blab on stage at the biggest conferences, spirit himself away on a megaot or by luxury penthouses overlooking Central Park. Another thing Yas doesn't do, at least to the extent possible, is pay more taxes than absolutely necessary. The unassuming Susquehanna HQ in Balakinwood long ago relocated from Philadelphia, avoiding a city specific tax. A pro Publica investigation found that Yas paid an average federal income tax rate far below what his Wall Street peers did, saving at least one billion dollars over six years. Yas's firm said the report contained numerous misstatements without specifying any alleged error. According to the outlet, and Susquehanna repeatedly fought the Internal Revenue Service in court, including over a sixty million dollar tax bill from twenty twelve, a case in which the US argues that a Susquehanna entity designed some trades solely to capture US tax benefits. According to court filings, Yas is unabashed about his distaste for wealth redistribution. America is approaching a point where no one's hungry, no one's cold, no one doesn't have some basic health insurance. He told the Adam Smith Society, what's the difference between a billionaire and a guy that's making one hundred thousand dollars a year. They're both at home watching Netflix. They're both on their iPhones. He and his partners fund a vast network of political donor groups and libertarian free market think tanks, including the Cato Institute, where Yas sat on the board for decades and to which the Susquehanna Foundation gave six million dollars in twenty twenty one. Through twenty twenty two, Cato has published commentary denouncing the TikTok ban entwined with taxes. Yas's other big project is reforming public education, a focus inspired by another encounter with his free market hero, Freedman. Yass says that in the nineteen nineties he asked the Nobel Laureate the best way to spend philanthropic money. Friedman suggested picking up the mantle of school choice, an approach to overhauling education. Today, the school choice movement encompasses a variety of alternatives to assigned to public schools, including charter schools, magnet schools, tuition tax credits, and school vouchers. Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, is a major donor to charter schools. Freedman promoted in particular the modern concept of school vouchers, or ways of routing public funds to parents who can use the money to send their children to a school of their choosing, including private or religious schools. Yas favors vouchers, too, arguing that failing government schools entrapped students and that tax dollars would be better spent empowering parents to decide where to en educate their offspring. You're not treated like a customer, Yes, said of public schools at an event for an educational award, the Yas Prize that he and his wife Jeanine created. You're a slave. Detractors say that such programs leave public schools to languish, particularly in rural areas, and that boucher programs can effectively re route public funds to private schools that can exclude students based on socioeconomic status, English proficiency, disciplinary record, or LGBTQ traits. This cause appeals to a small but highly engaged group with almost unlimited resources like Jeff Yass, Betsy de Vas, and Charles Koch, says Josh Cowan, author of The Privateers, How billionaires created a culture war and sold school vouchers. Supporting school voucher programs can also be a shrewd financial maneuver. In Pennsylvania, the tax credits for donating to eligible scholarship funds can amount to as much as ninety percent of the gift. Tax experts have raised concerns about donor's double dipping by combining state credits with federal deductions to recoup a tax free profit on the original contribution. One thing is clear, Pennsylvania's tax credits are well known to Yas and his colleagues, who've donated tens of millions of dollars for more than a decade. Since twenty thirteen, four entities tied to Susquehann executives Yas's Philadelphia Trading, Greenberg's JKG Florida Business, Danchik's RTE, and managing director Mark Dooley's MLD Trading collected a total of more than sixty one million dollars in tax credits under two Pennsylvania school voucher programs. According to state data, Yas back's political candidates who favor voucher programs, both inside and outside Pennsylvania. In Kentucky, he gave six million dollars last year to a Rand Paul affiliated group that supported Republican gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron. In Texas, he made a six million dollar do nation to pro voucher Governor Greg Abbott, whose campaign called it the largest political gift in the state's history. Through a spokesman, Yas says he plans to support pro school choice candidates in any state. Jessica Levin, litigation director at the Education Law Center, says the contributions bear scrutiny. You have to ask yourself, why are some of the wealthiest people promoting these programs. If there's one place where Yas is prone to tilting a poker term for digging in, sometimes emotionally, despite losses, it could be in his political giving. In twenty ten, he and his co founders back to failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial bid by Anthony Hardy Williams. Cameron lost last year. In Kentucky, there have been other losses, including a primary challenger to Pennsylvania Representative Summerly. Despite Yas funded attack ads casting the incumbent as insufficiently democratic. Carolyn Carluccio, a Republican contender for Pennsylvania Supreme Court, also failed in her race last year despite about four million dollars in funding from groups tied to Yas. In Yas's home state, activists accuse him of trying to eviscerate public schools, so much so that when Abbod Elementary, an ABC comedy about a fictional Philadelphia public school, featured a plot line about charter schools last year, some viewers interpreted it as a swipe at Yas. In early June, when Jay Z's company Rock Nation announced a campaign supporting vouchers for Philadelphia's low income students, critics quickly invoked Yas's role in the state's school choice skirmish. A patchwork quilt of groups protesting Yas's influence has been stitched together in the past three years in Pennsylvania. Jewish Voice for Peace arranged one rally in twenty twenty one in which protesters assembled at Susquehanna headquarters, only to discover that they could simply enter the building unhindered by security. Folks just walked inside, says Ariel Clagsbrunn, a deputy camp director of the Action Center on Race and Economy who attended the event. It spoke to how little attention he's gotten for someone who has such an increasingly large role in politics. The protesters staged to sit in, demanding a discussion with Yas, until security intervened. The following year, protesters found the driveway blocked off. Yas had arranged for a food truck to be waiting outside with donuts, a move Clagsbourne interprets as a light troll. The activists huddled to discuss whether it would be ethical to accept the donuts. They decided it was not. Options trading is about managing uncertainty, and for Yas, TikTok's fate is nothing but uncertain. Under the bill Biden signed into law, TikTok's US arm needs to be sold by early twenty twenty five or else face a ban. It could find a buyer, which theoretically could be a payday for Yas, but with so many variables, it's a wildly complicated prospect. The Chinese government would ne need to approve a divestiture, which could cost a suitor forty billion dollars or more In another version of events, a legal challenge Bye Dance filed in which the company says divesting is simply not possible, not commercially, not technologically, not legally, could result in repeated delays of the ban. If Trump is elected this fall, he could play a role in determining TikTok's fate first, though Trump needs all the financial help he can muster. In recent months, his campaign's fundraising badly trailed Biden's, though his felony conviction boosted donations. Wall Street and Silicon Valley doyennes, who once distance themselves from Trump, have lined up behind him, attracted by the prospect of lower taxes and looser regulation. Yas and Trump might make odd bedfellows. The former has a mind like a calculator, according to a former Yas colleague, and Trump's is more like a random number generator. But Trump can't risk alienating anyone with money and has apparently made up his mind that Trump better suits his purposes as the twenty twenty four election approaches. Yas's other obsession is loosening the rules on sports betting, even though some forecasts estimated the industry's volumes would reach about two hundred and fifty billion dollars in a mature market. Yas posited at a twenty twenty penel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that it could be much more. If the sports betting world goes the way options exchanges and stock exchanges went, with faster technology and low costs to trade, market volume could easily go to one trillion dollars, he said. Yas is steering Susquehanna into prediction markets, a niche where traders bet on all kinds of eventualities in politics, economics, and pop culture. These markets are still very small, approved in the US in minor and academic contexts. The federal agency that regulates derivatives has cracked down on this nascent industry, fearful political betting can threaten election in n integrity. In twenty twenty, Susquehanna used licensed platforms in the UK to take the other side of bets as much as one hundred million dollars on the original Biden versus Trump election. This year, Susquehanna started a trading desk on Kulshe, a rare regulated prediction market in the US where users can wager on questions like how high will bitcoin go this month. How many weeks will Taylor Swift's new album spend at number one on the charts. How many Biden Trump debates will happen before the election. Will the US get rid of TikTok by May twenty twenty five. Yas's firm is the first big trader there, with Tom Maloney, David Voriakos, and Catherine Burton.