The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

Written by Rob Copeland

Narrated by Rob Copeland and Will Damron

This program features an author's note and epilogue read by the author.

The unauthorized, unvarnished story of famed Wall Street hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio.

Ray Dalio does not want you to listen to this audiobook.

Late last year, when the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company’s eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles. In The Fund, award-winning New York Times journalist Rob Copeland punctures this carefully-constructed narrative of the benevolent business titan, exposing his much-promoted “principles” as one of the great feats of hubris in modern memory—in practice, they encouraged a toxic culture of paranoia and backstabbing.

The Fund is a thrilling, stranger-than-fiction journey into a rarefied world of wealth and power. It offers an unflinching look at the pain so often caused by the “radical transparency” Dalio has described as a core tenet of his recipe for business success and a meaningful life. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with those inside and around the firm, Copeland takes readers into the room as former FBI director Jim Comey kisses Dalio's ring, recent Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick drinks the Kool-Aid, and a rotating cast of memorable characters grapple with their personal psychological and moral limits—all under the watchful eye of their charismatic leader.

This is a cautionary tale for anyone convinced that the ability to make lots of money has anything at all to do with unlocking the principles of human nature.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781250322845

Rob Copeland

Rob Copeland has followed Bridgewater since arriving at the WSJ in 2013. He has interviewed dozens of current and former Bridgewater employees, including Dalio, and many of his erstwhile heirs apparent. In 2020, Copeland wrote one of the most viewed stories in recent WSJ memory, a front-page story about the private Manhattan Project to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. The Fund is his first book.

Reviews for The Fund

[Anne Mowat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Exhaustively researched. The writer was as fair as he could be in the face of stonewalling and aggressive pushback from a megalomaniac hedge fund trader and his hired guns. A fascinating micro-study of how vulnerable we are to the moral bankruptcy at the heart of so many finance and tech “succcess stories”.