Steven A. Cohen

Cohen was born on June 11, 1956, and raised in Great Neck, New York, where his father worked as a dress manufacturer in Manhattan's garment district and his mother was a piano teacher. He grew up in a Jewish family.

The third of eight children, Cohen developed an interest in poker during high school, often wagering his own money in tournaments. Cohen often enjoyed playing with his friends and has credited the game with teaching him "how to take risks." He graduated from John L. Miller Great Neck North High School in 1974, where he played on the soccer team.

Cohen received an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. While at Penn, he joined the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity's Theta chapter, where he served as treasurer. A friend helped him open a brokerage account using $1,000 of his tuition money, which marked his entry into financial markets.

Gruntal & Co. (1978–1992)

In 1978, after graduating from Penn, Cohen got a Wall Street job as a junior trader in the options arbitrage department at Gruntal & Co. On his first day on the job at Gruntal & Co., he made an $8,000 profit. He eventually would go on to make the company around $100,000 a day and eventually managed a $75 million portfolio and six traders. Cohen was running his trading group at Gruntal & Co. by 1984 and continued running it until he started his own company, SAC Capital, in 1992.

In the late 1980s, the SEC became suspicious that Cohen had used inside information in December 1985 when he bet that RCA and GE would merge ahead of the announcement. The SEC called him to testify but he refused to answer any questions, invoking his right against self-incrimination. The SEC then started looking into his other investments from the same period. However, Cohen was not charged with insider trading.

S.A.C. Capital Advisors (1992–2016)

In 1992, Cohen started S.A.C. Capital Advisors with $10 million of his own money and another $10 million from outside capital. The company's name is derived from his initials.

In 2003, the New York Times wrote that "SAC is one of the biggest hedge funds and is known for frequent and rapid trading." In 2006, The Wall Street Journal reported that while Cohen was once a rapid-fire trader who never held trading positions for extended periods, he now held an increasing number of equities for longer periods.

As of 2009, the firm managed $14 billion in equity.

Wealth

In 2024, Forbes estimated Cohen's net worth at $21.3 billion, ranking him the 30th richest person in the United States.

Cohen was dubbed "the hedge fund king" in a 2006 Wall Street Journal article. His 2005 compensation was reportedly $1 billion, considerably higher than his 2001 compensation of $428 million. In February 2015, Forbes listed Cohen as the highest-earning hedge-fund manager in 2014. In December 2013, Cohen's New York penthouse in the Bloomberg Tower was listed with an initial sale price of $115 million. According to Institutional Investor, Cohen made an estimated $1.7 billion in 2020. In 2025, Cohen earned an estimated $3.4 billion, topping Bloomberg's annual ranking of the world's highest-paid hedge fund managers for the first time, surpassing longtime rival Ken Griffin of Citadel. Point72's flagship fund returned approximately 17.5% in 2025, its fourth consecutive year of double-digit gains.

Cohen has been married twice. In 1979, he married Patricia Finke, a New York native from a working-class background who grew up in the Washington Heights, Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. They divorced in 1990 and have two children together.

In 1991, through a dating service, Cohen met Alexandra "Alex" Garcia, a single mother of Puerto Rican descent. Garcia had also grown up in Washington Heights, moving there from her original home in the projects of Harlem. "She'd always wanted to marry a millionaire," a friend told BusinessWeek. She told reporters at New York Magazine that she thought Cohen was "the funniest person she'd ever met." Garcia, a longtime Mets fan, has taken an active role in the Mets since Cohen purchased the team, and is listed as an owner along with Cohen.

Garcia serves as the president of the Amazin' Mets Foundation, the team's associated charity. They have had four children together.

Cohen loosely inspired the character Bobby Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis, on the Showtime series Billions. He was portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio in the 2023 film Dumb Money, a biographical comedy-drama covering the GameStop short squeeze. In 1998, Cohen purchased a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) home on 14 acres (57,000 m2) in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2021, Cohen purchased a 31,000-square-foot mansion in Palm Beach County, west of Delray Beach.

Cohen has given $715 million to philanthropic causes throughout his life, including to charitable causes relating to veterans and children's health.

Cohen serves on the board of trustees of the New York-based Robin Hood Foundation.

Via the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, the Cohens have donated to projects involved in health, education, arts and culture, and the New York community. In 2014, the Cohen Foundation provided funding, via the New York University Langone Center, for the study of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. The foundation gave a grant in excess of $100,000 to the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in 2014. In 2019, the foundation contributed $50 million of the more than $400 million raised for the New York Museum of Modern Art. The museum announced in 2017 that MoMA's largest contiguous gallery will be called the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Cohen is on the board of the MoMa and LA MOCA. In 2024, the foundation gave a $116 million gift to LaGuardia Community College, which became the largest donation of any US community college.

In 2008, the Cohen Foundation gave a $50 million gift to expand and improve emergency care at Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP). The Cohen Children's Emergency Department opened in June 2011. In January 2016, the Cohen Foundation gave $75 million to establish the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns at NYP/Weill Cornell. NYP announced a $35 million gift to address the youth mental health crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic in July 2023.

In April 2016, Cohen announced the creation and a commitment of $275 million to the Cohen Veterans Network. The CVN's goal is to establish mental-health centers for veterans and their families throughout the United States. The goal was the establishment of 20 to 25 centers by 2020.

Cohen Veterans Bioscience, also funded by Cohen, conducts research into the effects of posttraumatic stress disorder on combat veterans.

In 2015, Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, donated $2.25 million to a Super PAC called America Leads that supported Chris Christie's presidential candidacy.

In 2017, Cohen contributed $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration.

In 2021, Cohen donated $500,000 to a Super PAC supporting Andrew Yang's candidacy in the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and a further $1.5 million to a Super PAC supporting Eric Adams.

Racketeering and insider trading allegations

In December 2009, Cohen and his brother Donald T. Cohen were sued by Steven's ex-wife Patricia Cohen for racketeering and insider trading. On March 30, 2011, the United States District Court in Manhattan dismissed the case, but on April 3, 2013, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the lower court had erred in dismissing fraud-based claims by his former spouse and revived the lawsuit. The appeals court also revived claims of racketeering and breach of fiduciary duty while upholding the dismissal of an unjust-enrichment claim.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Pierre N. Leval said that Patricia Cohen had made a "plausible" allegation that Steven Cohen had concealed the $5.5 million during negotiations on a separation agreement in 1989, which preceded the divorce. The revival of the lawsuit came amid mounting pressure on Steven Cohen over an insider-trading investigation that led to the arrest of Michael Steinberg, one of Cohen's closest confidantes at SAC Capital. SAC affiliates reached two civil insider trading settlements totaling nearly $616 million with the Securities and Exchange Commission. SAC neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in either case.

SEC investigation (2012–2016)

In November 2012, Cohen was implicated in an alleged insider trading scandal involving an ex-SAC manager, Mathew Martoma. The SEC brought charges against many other SAC employees from 2010 to 2013 with various outcomes. Martoma was convicted in 2014, in what federal prosecutors billed as the most profitable insider-trading conspiracy in history. The SEC later brought a civil lawsuit against Cohen, alleging his failure to supervise Martoma and Michael Steinberg, who was a senior employee and confidant of Cohen's. Cohen settled his civil case with regulators in January 2016; the agreement with the SEC prohibited Cohen from managing outside money until 2018.

S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in 2013 and paid $1.8 billion in penalties and was required to stop handling investments for outsiders. Cohen avoided criminal indictment himself. He was featured in January 2017 The New Yorker article titled "When the Feds Went After the Hedge-Fund Legend Steven A. Cohen".