Jeff Yass: the poker player betting on Trump

GOP Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania

(Image credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff)

published 20 August 2024

US presidential elections have often featured a Republican billionaire whose interests come to dominate the political conversation, says Vanity Fair. In 2008 it was all about the Koch brothers; in 2016, about Robert Mercer bankrolling the alt-right; 2024 is shaping up to be the year of Jeff Yass – “the most successful financier you’ve probably never heard of”.

The 68-year-old co-founder of Wall Street trading firm Susquehanna has emerged as “the single biggest political donor” for 2024, contributing more than $70 million as of early June. A registered Libertarian and former “Never Trumper”, Yass professes not to be supporting Donald Trump’s campaign. But since much of the cash has found its way into a super PAC (an organisation that pools contributions to donate to political campaigns) run by Club for Growth (an anti-tax political advocacy group which has declared its support for Trump) that’s “a moot point”, says Bloomberg Businessweek.

Yass is a professional gambler – a poker player turned options trader who built a $47 billion personal fortune making rational bets. He weighs the “expected value” or potential payoff for every decision, and this election he has a lot at stake.

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How Jeff Yass became Trump's secret weapon

In 2012, Susquehanna invested a few million dollars in an obscure Chinese company called ByteDance with an interesting video app. That 15% stake in TikTok is now worth roughly $40 billion, according to the Financial Times, and could be worth up to $150 billion if ByteDance goes public and achieves a Facebook level of valuation. It was “one of the best plays of the decade”, says Vanity Fair. “But Yass’s golden run is in danger.” In April, President Biden signed a law forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company or face a complete ban on national security grounds.

“Gambling is all about understanding your opponent’s weakness.” Trump’s was lack of cash. So those close to Yass were unsurprised when the former president – once a die-hard TikTok opponent – flip-flopped in the spring. If Trump is re-elected, TikTok will get a stay of execution.

The son of an accountant, Yass grew up middle-class in Queens, New York, and “displayed a preternatural talent for odds-making during weekends at the horse track”, says Vanity Fair. In the 1970s, he studied maths and economics at SUNY Binghamton, becoming “the nucleus” of a gang of friends who formed a poker-playing clique and gambling syndicate. Yass’s crew roamed the country, scoring big on race tracks and in casinos. In 1987, after buying a seat on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, they formed an options trading firm dubbed Susquehanna, which still operates out of an office in Philadelphia.

Are the odds in Yass's favour?

Over the ensuing decades, Susquehanna became a huge player in this burgeoning market, says Businessweek, trading everything from silver, Swiss francs and crude oil to bitcoin and sugar. “If you can trade it, Susquehanna will likely name a price.” The firm’s traders – who are honed to think about markets “through the lens of poker and probabilities” – eschew outside influences to draw on bespoke research and algorithms. Because there are no outside investors, “the firm largely operates outside the public eye”.

Former business associates and colleagues who spoke to Businessweek reveal a man “who built one of Wall Street’s stealthiest yet most powerful trading operations”, with a network of influence that “reaches even further than his harshest critics realise”. Yet Yass and Trump “make odd bedfellows”, says Businessweek. Yass has a mind “like a calculator”; Trump’s is “more like a random number generator”. But, for the moment at least, they’re betting the same way. Doubtless Yass is keeping a weather eye on the changing odds.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.