Clark Lewis

Clark Lewis

Paul Touradji founded Clark Lewis in 2008 in Greenwich, Connecticut, initially as a vehicle to manage his own wealth alongside his hedge fund, Touradji Capital Management. After shuttering the fund in 2011 following a period of volatile commodities performance and a high-profile legal separation from his former wife, Touradji concentrated his energy on the family office. The wealth originates from his career as one of the youngest and most aggressive Tiger Cub managers, deploying a physically informed approach to natural resources that generated outsized returns before the financial crisis. The office is named after the Clark and Lewis mountain ranges in Montana, reflecting Touradji's personal connection to the American West. Clark Lewis operates with a natural-resources-dense mandate that spans private equity, real estate, and liquid strategies. The firm's investment posture is anchored in tangible assets—farmland, water rights, energy infrastructure, and hard-commodity exposure—areas where Touradji believes informational edge is still attainable outside of crowded institutional markets. Confirmed positions include a substantial aggregation of ranchland and agricultural properties in the Rocky Mountain West, assembled primarily through direct acquisitions. The firm has also been known to commit to external commodity and macro hedge fund managers, extending capital to traders Touradji backed during his time as a principal allocator. Geographic concentration remains weighted toward North America, particularly the Intermountain West, though the office has historically evaluated upstream energy and mining projects in Australia and Canada. The office operates with a lean structure, consistent with a single-family vehicle that prioritizes capital preservation and direct control over assets. Its footprint includes agricultural operating companies that manage the ranchland portfolio, a structure that blurs the line between passive investment and active stewardship. In August 2023, Touradji was reported to have listed a 29,495-acre ranch in Meagher County, Montana, for $46.5 million (per The Real Deal, 2023), one of several large-scale land transactions that signal ongoing portfolio rotation. The office does not actively market for outside capital but has been reported to co-invest alongside a small circle of family-owned industrial conglomerates on large timber and energy deals. Clark Lewis represents the downstream evolution of a Tiger Cub lineage that typically spawns long-short equity funds—but Touradji's vehicle hardened into an owner's office for physical assets. The firm's structural differentiator is its willingness to operate, not just own, the land and resource assets on its balance sheet, maintaining a direct operating-company relationship with ranches and farmland rather than outsourcing to third-party managers. This hands-on model creates an investment lifecycle that can span decades, insulated from the quarterly redemption cycles that defined Touradji's prior career.