Humiliation and sobbing at the world’s biggest hedge fund

It’s not easy working for Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund, according to The Fund, a new book by New York Times reporter Rob Copeland.

Copeland says some at Bridgewater refer to Dalio as Ray-man, after the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the Oscar-winning Rain Man, and one can see why.

The firm is governed by Dalio’s “principles”, one of which is people must “value getting at truth so badly that they are willing to humiliate themselves to get it”.

Copeland reports how Dalio once reduced a pregnant employee to “animalistic sobbing”. A copy of the meeting was recorded and kept in Bridgewater’s Transparency Library. An edited version, titled “Pain + Reflection = Progress”, was sent out to all Bridgewater employees, with Dalio also ordering it be played for job candidates.

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Copeland also reports that Bridgewater built an app for ranking employees on believability. Unfortunately for the boss, some other employees ranked as more believable than Dalio. The app was subsequently changed, so Dalio would be automatically ranked as Bridgewater’s most believable person.

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Another story concerns a departing employee who was gifted a card that memorialised all his poor ratings at Bridgewater. “The best gift anyone can receive,” Dalio told him, “is knowledge of their own weaknesses.”

Although an advocate of “radical transparency”, Dalio isn’t impressed by Copeland’s account of his own apparent weaknesses. It is, says Dalio, “one of those sensational and inaccurate tabloid books written to sell books to people who like gossip”.