The family drama behind the $25 billion leftist empire.
Millions of people watched the series finale of Succession, a show based on the Murdoch family succession drama, complete with shots at Republicans, conservatives and FOX News.
The real life succession drama of the Soros family was however greeted with a few media puff pieces including at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The passage of the $25 billion Open Society network which topples governments, uproots societies and funds the leftist internationale to the next generation of the Soros clan garnered media press releases.
But there’s plenty of succession drama in the family of the leftist billionaire.
As George’s firstborn, Robert Soros might have been expected to inherit the throne. A trader like his father, Robert was temporarily given the reins to Soros Fund Management before having them taken back, and then given back again. Robert’s marriage broke up after he allegedly cheated on his wife, who had cancer, with a nude model. The divorce case dragged on, threatening his finances, and he left to start his own Soros Capital Management.
Robert’s younger brother Jonathan, who had shared the role of chief investor with him, seemed like the likely heir apparent. Jonathan, like his father and unlike his older brother, had a much more ambitious political vision, getting down and dirty with the leftist groups his father backed.
Jonathan even carried the middle name of Tidavar: George’s antisemitic father, who charged Jews trying to escape the Holocaust “whatever the market would bear” and who had dispatched his son to participate in the confiscation of Jewish property to “cheer the unhappy lad up”.
The second Soros son could soon be found mingling at Democrat fundraisers and leftist organization meetings including those of the Democracy Alliance. Like his father, Jonathan had an ambitious program for transforming elections. But in 2021, the Soros finances took a beating, and, after an unstated break with his father, Jonathan Soros struck out on his own.
“We didn’t get on on certain points,” George Soros commented dryly. “That became evident to both of us, particularly to him.”
Of the two sons to whom George was planning to bequeath his empire in 2004, Robert and Jonathan, both were gone. The two heirs had been meant to rule the dual empire: Robert would handle the Soros money and Jonathan the political activism. But George’s relationships with his oldest sons, like most of his relationships with human beings, fell apart.
Soros was running out of sons to take his place and carry on his poisoned legacy.
Raised in what he had described as a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”, George Soros, still in his late twenties, had begun dating his first wife, Annaliese Witschak, a German immigrant from Hamburg. His parents were overjoyed that his girlfriend wasn’t Jewish. With their approval, George Soros married Annaliese and moved out of their apartment and into hers.
But George was a cold and terrible person. By the late seventies, he was very wealthy and his family hated him. Harshly critical of his sons, he showed Robert and Jonathan little in the way of affection. And his marriage to Annaliese broke up after he refused to look for their daughter, Andrea, after she had stayed out too late.
The same day that George Soros left his family, the 48-year-old met a 23-year-old woman playing tennis. “How old are you anyway,” he later demanded. He may not have realized at the time that Susan Weber was Jewish. George’s mother hated her because of that. “My mother was quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish,” he told an interviewer.
George’s mother did what she could to sabotage the marriage, including, in one memorable moment, calling him and screaming, “my son, everyone is going to think you are a homosexual.” But even without her, his second marriage was never going to be any happier. George had been too busy for his children from his first marriage and he had even less time for new ones.
Alex and Gregory were raised by Ping: a nanny from China. A family friend commented that, “he is the kind of father who can interact with a 15-year-old much better than a two-year-old.”
The second divorce left behind two more lost sons. Unlike Robert and Jonathan, Alex and Gregory had not been raised to succeed their absent father and had no talent for it.
Little is known of Gregory, the youngest, who has avoided the spotlight, but Alex grew up a “shy… chubby kid” and was generally overlooked in college. A few years after his parents divorced, Alex began working hard to lose weight and used his father’s wealth to hook up with models and fund massive parties filled with celebrities.
It wouldn’t take much of a psychologist to figure out what was the matter. Alex’s father had collected money and power, while his mother filled the hole by renovating houses and collecting art. Their son had dreamed of “being normal”, but that obviously was not going to happen.
“I was very angry at him, I felt unwanted,” Alex Soros complained. “He had a very hard time communicating love, and he was never really around.”
What connected Alex, like Robert and Jonathan, to their father was money and power.
In 2012, the New York Times ran its first major profile on Alex Soros headlined, “Making Good on the Family Name”.
The third son had discovered that the way to his father’s heart was through social justice and had revamped his trashy parties as fundraisers for political causes. The approach eventually paid off as a decade later, George Soros handed over his political empire to Alex Soros.
Alex Soros has the thinnest resume of his brothers. He lacks the financial acumen of Robert or Jonathan, and shows no apparent leadership skills or larger vision. But that may be exactly why he survived and his half brothers did not. With Robert and Jonathan, a breaking point eventually arrived and they struck out on their own, but Alex lacks the skills or the backbone for it.
“I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood,” George Soros confessed. The radical billionaire had compared himself to a deity over the years. How better to ensure that he could never be overshadowed by his sons than to pick the weakest of them?
That may very well be a major part of the Soros succession story.
“We think alike,” George Soros said of Alex. That is to say, Alex will serve as George’s undead proxy.
George, determined to control his empire even from beyond the grave, may have chosen a feckless party boy who would never challenge him, but just enjoy going to parties and posing with famous people. But there is also another element to the Soros succession story that strikes at the heart of the billionaire’s famously ugly tangled relationship with the Jewish people.
Alex, unlike Robert and Jonathan, is Jewish. And once he dived into political funding, he quickly set himself apart by playing a role in leftist Jewish groups like Jewish Funds for Justice and the Bend the Arc: Jewish Action PAC. His thesis was even titled, “Jewish Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature”.
“When I was six or seven years old,” Alex Soros related in an essay, George had sat him down and told him about how he watched the Holocaust play out, claiming that his grandfather had “helped save other Jews”.
In reality, Tidavar, otherwise a failure, had charged Jews “whatever the market would bear” and worked with Hungarian Nazi collaborators. George would later agree that he had “helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of guilt. “It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”
George Soros knew better than anyone else how much his parents had hated Jews. Yet, if we are to believe Alex, he told his first Jewish son a different version of the story in which he and his grandfather were heroes fighting Nazis, instead of collaborating with...
