Paulson & Co.

Paulson & Co.

Paulson & Co. was established in 1994 by John Paulson, a former mergers-and-acquisitions banker at Bear Stearns, who leveraged that restructuring expertise into an event-driven investment philosophy. The firm rose from a small merger-arbitrage manager to a global investment force by seeking dislocation between market perception and intrinsic value, a framework that would define its most famous campaigns. The firm deploys capital across distressed debt, merger arbitrage, bankruptcies, and post-reorganization equities, often concentrating in situations where corporate restructuring or industry shocks create binary outcomes. Paulson & Co. gained prominence for its deeply researched, contrarian stance during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, famously shorting subprime mortgage securities through credit default swaps. Post-crisis, the firm evolved its mandate to include large-cap event-driven equities, gold, and real estate, with notable bets on gold through the SPDR Gold Trust and a multi-billion dollar land investment in Puerto Rico. Paulson & Co. operates from a single office in New York. The firm's scale and strategy have historically been closely tied to the personal capital and reputation of its founder, John Paulson, who, in July 2020, announced the conversion of the firm into a family office, returning all outside investor capital to focus exclusively on his own wealth. The firm's most significant structural evolution was its shift from a leading hedge fund to a private family investment vehicle in 2020, a move that removed the pressure of quarterly redemptions and allowed for longer-duration, illiquid wagers unconstrained by institutional client mandates. This transition isolated the firm's firepower behind the assets and convictions of a single principal.