5/21/2026
Is Chris Hohn Britain’s Answer to Warren Buffett?
Financial Times (05/21/26) Mourselas, Costas; Pollard, Amelia
It’s a sunny April afternoon in London and the spirit of God is moving upon Sir Chris Hohn. The UK’s most successful hedge fund manager holds an intense gaze as he quotes a Hindu mystic, bathed in light streaming in from the windows of his corner office on London’s Clifford Street. “God is not a man in the sky with a white beard,” Hohn recites softly, dressed modestly in a beige suit and white shirt. “Close your eyes, and in the darkness you can know God and God is consciousness.” Most hedge fund managers prioritize earthly matters over the business of the soul. But then most hedge fund managers are not like Hohn. Hohn, 59, is perhaps the closest thing Britain has to Warren Buffett. His Children’s Investment Fund (TCI) has become the fifth most profitable hedge fund of all time, last year bringing in more profits after fees than any other firm. Yet unlike its behemoth rivals Citadel and Millennium that employ thousands of people, his fund has done this with around half a dozen elite analysts and one all-powerful portfolio manager at the helm. Where other hedge funds of a similar size spread wagers across thousands of investments, Hohn has built his record of success on a series of colossal multibillion-dollar bets, currently managing roughly $77 billion in only 15 positions globally. His success as an investor has allowed him to turn his charitable foundation into one of the UK’s largest, giving away billions to public health, climate and children’s causes. Buffett, whom Hohn speaks to often, tells the FT his record is “exceptional." Hohn is driven by deep convictions: friends and former colleagues describe an investor of supreme self-confidence, a fierce activist unafraid to confront unruly executives, and a devoted philanthropist who personally gave away more than £1 billion last year. “Most of us see the world in shades of grey, where there are three or five things which are important to an investment thesis,” Rishi Sunak, the former UK prime minister who once worked at the fund, tells the FT. “Chris has an incredible ability to think in black and white. He focuses on one, maybe two things that drive the investment thesis and then has the confidence to scale up the bet so it’s a big part of the fund.” This iron certitude extends from finance to faith; when he is asked about the spiritual beliefs that inspire him, Hohn corrects the question’s premise. He “knows,” he says, rather than believes. Yet his convictions are increasingly being tested. A wave of advances in AI is crashing against his portfolio and challenging his biggest holdings. His fund’s largest investment, a roughly $14 billion position in jet engine manufacturer GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE), is down around 7% this year as the Iran war hits the global airline industry. The fund is down 4.3% to the end of April, the worst start of the year since 2022. In this context, sureties can begin to look like weaknesses. “A lot of the geniuses in this world are wired this way,” says one person who knows him well. “They think they see things nobody else sees. When you take a bet the right way and it’s directional, you crush it. But when things go wrong it can go terribly as well. But that is the main danger.” In a rare, in-depth series of interviews, Hohn says he is unconcerned by the fund’s performance, pointing to previous periods when key stocks in the portfolio fell in half before more than tripling in value. He wants to do the best for his investors, he says, but “we don’t control them.” If they decide to pull out, “why would I cry? Maybe I’ll do better?” It is folly to say concentrated investors are destined to fail, he says, citing his hero as an example: “The most famous concentrated investor is Warren Buffett. Anyone who knows his work knows he spoke frequently on concentrated investing. No one questions his genius.” Hohn’s investment style and commitment to charity may draw comparisons with Buffett, but the two are starkly different characters. Where the so-called Oracle of Omaha is famous for his folksy charm and cult of personality, Hohn keeps a lower profile. In person, he can be voluble one moment but prickly the next. When he feels challenged he speaks rapidly, often ending sentences with a question: yeah? Do you see that? You with me? But when he speaks of God or of charity, his pace of speaking slows and he becomes softer, gentler. Over six hours of interviews with the FT, spread across several days, he is least open about his upbringing, answering in short, clipped sentences. He was born to Jamaican parents who emigrated to the UK and was raised in Addlestone, Surrey. His childhood was “non-eventful.” His parents were “very poor,” he says, and he felt an “obligation to assist.” When asked if he looked up to any of his family members he answers “no.” “School and university was a way out.” He graduated from Southampton university with a first in economics and accounting, and subsequently studied at Harvard Business School where he met Jamie Cooper, who would become his first wife. Taking a job at hedge fund Perry Capital, Hohn harbored aspirations to make a fortune, which initially put off Cooper. But he won her over with a desire to use those anticipated funds to alleviate suffering, partly resulting from a trip to the Philippines when he saw children living in poverty, court documents say. But he had little doubt of his destiny, he says. “Bob Dylan said from a young age he knew he was going to be successful. He was operating in intuition,” says Hohn. “My intuition, which is the intelligence of the soul, said my purpose here was to help people.” On a simpler level, he loved investing, calling it “one of the purest ways to apply intellect to making money." When Hohn founded The Children’s Investment Fund in 2003, he initially hard-wired philanthropic giving to a sister foundation, to be run by Cooper, in the firm’s founding documents. (He has since broken the link and now gives on a discretionary basis). His early years were fabulously profitable. He generated 42% returns on average, with overwhelming investor interest. Like Buffett, Hohn focuses on big companies with powerful moats that help them stave off competitors. He also holds his positions for an average of nine years, a timeline more akin to a private equity firm than a trader. But unlike Buffett, Hohn spurns a whole host of industries, including banks, utilities, media, and insurers. Hohn says there are perhaps just over 200 companies in the world that are investable and, because of the uncertainties fomented by AI and climate change, that figure is decreasing. In those early days, Hohn’s demands to generate returns and fund the foundation took a toll on the staff helping to generate those profits, some now recall. “He was completely insatiable with a single-mindedness I had never encountered with anyone it was bruising,” says one former employee. “[But] he made everyone that worked with him very rich.” For Hohn, the key metric for any company is pricing power, highly valuing the ability to push through inflation-busting price increases. He is not dazzled by stratospheric revenue growth like other investors. “Chris likes buying global monopolies or duopolies,” says TCI analyst Ben Walker. His investment style is also partly informed by a desire for control. Like Buffett, he thinks of himself as an “owner” of his stocks, rather than a speculator, and it is from this mindset that he acts as an activist to defend his interests in a company. For instance, Hohn does not like to short, or bet against, stocks, because the investor on the other side of the bet can recall their shares at any time and crystallize a loss. Short sellers can also be subject to short squeezes, where investors target them by buying the stocks they are betting against, forcing them to close their position. “I don’t like to hold my destiny to other people,” he says. Through that lens, his highly irregular portfolio starts to make more sense. At its core is 31% in infrastructure, including two Canadian railway firms, Spanish infrastructure company Ferrovial (BME: FER), and French construction company Vinci (EPA: DG). “Railroads, toll roads, airports, cell phone towers,” says Hohn rhythmically, punctuating each category by tearing out a page from an investor deck and slamming it on the coffee table in front of him. It is nearly impossible for rivals to pony up the cash or build a business case to justify a new highway or railway next to an existing one, or to get the regulatory approvals for a new airport. “Is AI going to be able to compete with a toll road or an airport? Probably not,” says Hohn. “Whether an electric car drives on a road or a petrol car [does], it makes no difference.” Perhaps the most characteristic Hohn investment is the GE Aerospace holding. He has put 18% of his entire fund, some $14 billion, into this single stock, a position so large it has little comparison in the hedge fund industry. What rationale could there be for making such a bet? “Airlines are a very competitive industry, thousands of airlines, lots of new entrants, but in aircraft engines there hasn’t been one new entrant for 50 years,” he says briskly. It can take on average 20 years for aircraft designers and builders to invite jet engine manufacturers to make bids, he explains, further narrowing the opportunities for a successful competitor. Even then, they would worry that a new competitor with cheaper engines may have issues that reveal themselves after years of use. “So the answer to the question is we study the barriers to entry very closely,” he says. Former employees say Hohn does not get emotionally attached to stocks, no matter how many years he has remained invested, giving him the flexibility to sell at a moment’s notice if he thinks the thesis has changed. Until recently, for example, the fund had an $8 billion position in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) — based on the thesis that the company has cornered corporates with a cost-effective bundle of services, such as Office and Teams, that are difficult for upstarts like Zoom to compete with. But the steady drumbeat of productivity tools from AI company Anthropic has raised doubts about its dominance of this space. For Hohn, the thesis had changed. This year, he cut the entirety of the fund’s position. “Chris doesn’t flirt with stocks,” says John Armitage of hedge fund Egerton, one of the most profitable managers of all time and an old mentor of Hohn. “He’s all in, or not in.” ‘I’m quite a direct guy’ The conviction that makes Hohn a committed stockpicker also makes him a fearsome activist. His first scalp, news stories of which are still framed in his office, was the defenestration of Werner Seifert, CEO of the Deutsche Börse (FWF: DB1Gn) stock exchange, in 2005. A smarting Seifert later wrote a book about Hohn’s no-holds-barred campaign, entitled Invasion of the Locusts. Hohn has become known for delivering blunt one-liners at the start of meetings with his targets, because “he can’t help himself,” according to one person that knows him. For example, he met Rajeev Misra, then CEO of SoftBank’s (9984.T) Vision Fund, around six years ago to discuss the financing extended to fraudulent German payments company Wirecard. Around that time, TCI held a rare short against Wirecard. Before saying anything else, Hohn told Misra “what you guys have done over here is very foolish,” according to a person with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I’m quite a direct guy,” says Hohn, when the FT recounts the anecdote. “I think they did do a few foolish financings.” Multiple people close to Hohn say that while he seemed to have a vast intellect, he can struggle with interpersonal relations. “He is not grounded by traditional societal norms,” says one former employee. “He doesn’t mind offending people.” Hohn pushes back against this assessment during a call alongside his second wife Kylie. Did people flag that he was neurodivergent, she asks? “I wouldn’t classify myself as neurodivergent,” he says. “OK,” she replies. Instead, Hohn describes himself as “unconstrained by traditional norms” like “hoard” your money or “run away if something happens” to a stock. Hohn may be a fierce activist, but he is not always a successful one. In 2008, the fund got bogged down in activist battles against U.S. rail company CSX (NASDAQ: CSX) and Japanese electricity wholesaler J-Power (TYO: 9513). Unlike some of its rivals, TCI did not rebound strongly in 2009, leading to redemptions from investors and the departure of staff. There was also the activist campaign to break up Dutch lender ABN Amro on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis. The resulting takeover — then the biggest banking deal of all time — netted $1 billion for the fund. But the payout ended up costing the UK taxpayer billions as toxic mortgage positions ultimately took down the Royal Bank of Scotland (NYSE: NWG), the lead buyer in the ABN Amro consortium. “I learnt over the last 20 years that you are better off to find a great company which is well managed and well governed than try to find a bad company and change the management or sell the company,” Hohn says. It was also a painful time for Hohn personally. A few years later, in 2012, Cooper began divorce proceedings against him. She was eventually granted a £337 million settlement in 2014, at that point, the largest ever recorded in the UK. The case became infamous as Hohn successfully argued that his status as an “unbelievable moneymaker” justified him keeping a larger than ordinary amount of their assets. “The financial crisis and divorce were my dark nights of the soul,” he now says. “Evolution occurs out of suffering.” People around Hohn say that he has moderated himself significantly over the past several years, a point partly made by the tenure of his analyst team, which is on average 14 years. Asked if he is a tough boss, he replies: “I think in my early days as an investor, that was true. There was a desire to really be the best. That desire is still the case today. But I would say I have changed a lot over the last 10 years.” Hohn’s veer towards the transcendental was sparked by his second wife, Kylie, a Harvard-trained academic with a doctorate in Slavic languages, whom he met in 2018. Hohn believes it has not only made him a better person, but a better investor. “When I met her, she said, ‘What do you know about consciousness?’” says Hohn. “I said absolutely nothing. She handed me a pile of books and said, ‘You better start learning, then!’” He adds that from the experiences they have had, he knows that they have had “past lives together." In an interview, Kylie confirms as much. “He leapt along the room on our third date and he said, ‘What the hell is going on, I already know you,’” she says. Already one of Britain’s most generous and prolific givers to charity through his foundation, Hohn has recently turned his philanthropic attention to spiritual causes. He co-founded what he says is the only UK charity dedicated to spiritual education, LightEn, with his wife. Annual reports in the foundation’s first three years of operation since 2023 show TCI contributed £29.3 million. The organization is centered around two retreats. The first, which Hohn has visited, is off the coast of Spain in Mallorca and run by the spiritual educator Zulma Reyo. Her book Inner Alchemy: The Path of Mastery, includes an acknowledgement to the Hohns. The other is under construction on more than 480 verdant acres in North Carolina, which Kylie Hohn hopes will begin operation next year. “It’s scattering many seeds of change but through love and connection to the highest aspect of ourselves,” she says. Ultimately, the Hohns want to help people better connect with their souls, which they argue would allow for greater empathy between human beings and hopefully an end to wars. “Humanity is on the wrong path and the state of consciousness of the world is not where it needs to be,” Chris Hohn says. “We need to choose peace not war. We need to choose love not hate.” People that know Hohn say he has been far happier since meeting Kylie and taking his spiritual turn — even if they have to put up with lengthy lectures on spiritual matters. “The worst thing about seeing Chris is you will get a one-hour lecture about spirituality, and if you’re a friend you get 40 links about spirituality or the next life,” jokes one person close to him. “All of his friends are happy to see him happy.” But Hohn’s dedication to spirituality and historic donations to causes including climate change — he has been a significant backer of the Extinction Rebellion activist group — can be seen to conflict with his work on maximizing profits as a hedge fund investor. For instance, his investments in Safran (Euronext Paris: SAF), GE, and Airbus (Euronext Paris: AIR) are all indirectly supporting companies that are helping countries re-arm. After being among the most vocal investors on climate change a few years ago, forcing companies to set out climate plans, he has more recently held off publicly pushing his companies to take even stronger action. Hohn admits grappling with the conundrum, and says his son has made the same observation. “My mindset had always been, maximize the profits and give the money to charity the charity can have the greatest leverage with the most money,” he says. However, he brings it back to his work in spreading spirituality, adding that this delineation may not be necessary: “If investors were more conscious, they would back more funds that were more impact-focused than profit-focused. “I do think we need to move to a world where we have more conscious investors where maybe they say part of my portfolio can go to making money. But another part must go towards having impact in the world,” he adds. Hohn says his spiritual outlook has made him a better investor because while “analysis is part of investing, intuition is another part." But he is no less demanding than he was. He recently threatened that each director of Spanish airport operator Aena (BME: AENA) would be personally liable if it did not raise its airline tariffs sufficiently. And his unyielding nature endures. The fund retains large positions in rating agencies S&P and Moody’s (NYSE: MCO), which make up 17% of the portfolio, and Visa (NYSE: V), which is 13%, as of the end of March. All have suffered so far this year as investors question their viability in the new age of AI. On rating agencies, he says, the real investment is in trust. “Investors have to trust [a rating], issuers have to trust it, regulators have to trust it. All this debt is held by insurance, pension and banks and you need a single source of trust.” “Buffett told me [about Moody’s]: if the financial crisis didn’t kill it, nothing will,” says Hohn. “He made me pledge that if we ever sold our shares in Moody’s we would sell to each other.” He has reached a stage, however, where losses hurt less than they once did. Roughly $12 billion of the fund’s capital is his, and consequently he is far less concerned about losing his investors if there is a dip in returns like in 2008. Even if his returns fell from 20% a year to 10%, he says, in seven years he would double his money to over $20 billion. “[If investors] say active management is dead, or you didn’t do well, it doesn’t matter,” says Hohn. “Go compound $20 billion at 10 or 15% a year [and] it’s more money than I can spend charitably.” He does not accrue yachts and holiday homes like other billionaires; he drives a Toyota Prius and wears a cheap plastic watch. Once again, he quotes a familiar figure to put his future into perspective. “Warren Buffett was asked when he invested in Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) [if] it was a risky investment,” says Hohn. “He said it depends on your time horizon. For my capital in the fund I can have a forever time horizon.”
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