InfluenceWatch Podcast #267: Weingarten Will Not Be Apologizing. The BMJ investigation, in turn, met with angry denunciations from nutrition experts who had worked on the US Dietary Guidelines; a petition asking the journal to retract Teicholzs work was signed by more than 180 credentialed professionals. McGoverns quip about Enron, a company that hasnt existed in 15 years, was a bit of a potshot. If John Arnold . Science Has Its Problems, But the Web Could Be the Fix, Psychology Is in Crisis Over Whether Its in Crisis, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.. While the industry as a whole and Centaurus itself have evolved dramatically since our inception, the uncompromising focus of the . To promote preregistration, the Center for Open Science offered the first 1,000 scientists who preregister their studies with the organization $1,000 each. Philanthropist John Arnold is pictured in this photo provided by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation on July 10, 2018. . Former Enron Corp. energy trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus Energy Master Hedge Fund. NatGas Conference Call Schedule, This article is part of NGI's Daily Gas Price Index. Foundations and 501(c)(3) public charities are barred from electioneering. Because investigating and replicating research begins with having the data and materials necessary to do so, he is particularly focused on making science more transparent. John Arnold is Founder and Co-Chair of Arnold Ventures. A year ago, talk in the Texas energy hub was mostly about defending oil and gas and denouncing renewables, Arnold, 47, said Monday on his Twitter account. Laura and John Arnold, Houston $285 million. Whether all this momentum will lead to transformational change decades from now is impossible to know. On the top of that list was the energy trading legend that is John Arnold. These critiques of science amounted to a deep philosophical quandary for the Arnolds, philanthropists who had dedicated their lives to a data-based approach to giving. Guest: John Arnold is an American philanthropist and founder of Arnold Ventures. Now everybody says we need replication; we need reproducibility, Ioannidis tells me. Far from simple charity, thats a recipe for plutocracy. In 2010 the Arnolds had signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half their wealthand he wanted to be as strategic about that goal as he had once been about trading. | By 2009, Centaurus was managing over $5 billion and had more than 70 employees. Nonprofits are very good at reporting their success rates and citing the science behind their interventions, but dig into their claimsas the Arnolds would try to doand you find that they often omit relevant context or confuse correlation with causation. But Shankman recognized that he and Arnold were different in one key respect: Arnold had a greater appetite for risk, a quality that seemed at odds with his quiet demeanor. All told, the foundations Research Integrity initiative has given more than $80 million to science critics and reformers in the past five years alone. Credit: Arnold Ventures. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert referred to researchers who had tried and failed to replicate the findings of one senior lecturer as shameless little bullies.. Like Nosek, Taubes had to Google Arnold to learn who he was. Consent By the time he was 14, Arnold was running his first company, selling collectible sports cards across state lines. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Those who support ICERs formula believe it could lower prices while critics argue that the formula is discriminator toward the elderly and those with disabilities or rare diseases. [1] Had something similar happened on Wall Street, he tweeted, the perpetrator would have been sentenced to 10 years in jail and the bank would have been fined a billion dollars. On a warm October day in 2014, envoys from 15 of America's wealthiest families gathered at Circle T, Ross Perot Jr .'s 2,500-acre ranch outside . Washington DC | New York | Houston | Pittsburgh | Mexico City Calgary | Chile. In 2016, John Arnold gave $250,000 to an unsuccessful effort to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts, and they poured more than $500,000 into a PAC that helped bolster Governor Charlie . Now, much of the discussion has shifted . And for two years they had been rejected again and againwhich was, by 2011, discouraging but not all that surprising to the 38-year-old scientist. [24], The Laura and John Arnold Foundation was a private foundation founded by Arnold and his wife Laura. Date Recorded: 1/12/2022 | Run-Time: 1:12:33 1.800.427.5747 While this private company, Arnold Ventures, is structurally indistinguishable from any other for-profit corporation, its purpose is strictly philanthropicbut it comes with key advantages. The incentives to produce positive results were so great, Nosek and others worried, that some scientists were simply locking their inconvenient data away. FORTUNE magazine once dubbed Arnold one of the least-known billionaires in the US. His profile in the public consciousness is almost nonexistent, and he rarely gives interviews. John D. Arnold is the founder and the only shareholder of Centaurus Energy Advisors, a hedge fund specializing in trading of energy. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. NET WORTH: $3.3 billion . Arnold was described as unapologetic for his success in Enrons final days. In a sense, thats the strongest weapon that we have. He's decided to shut down his firm Centaurus Advisors and return investor money, retiring at the ripe old age of 38, according to The New York Times.Arnold rose to prominence at now disgraced Enron for his natural gas trading prowess. May 17 (Reuters) - John Arnold, a former Enron trader and hedge fund honcho known as the "king of natural gas", is backing an energy-focused credit fund that will aim to take advantage of. According to Forbes, Arnold has a personal fortune of $3 billion as of March, putting him at No. A guy such . Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Bachelor of Arts/Science, Vanderbilt University. John D. Arnold is an American philanthropist and businessman. The Therapy Part of Psychedelic Therapy Is a Mess. 171 on Forbes list. Gregg Fleisher, who taught him calculus in high school, recalls an occasion when Arnold instantly solved a math puzzle that had been known to stump PhDs. The Biggest Microbiome Study Sheds Light on Shared Health Risks, The Little Bang Helping Physicists Study the Infant Universe. In recent decades, math and science whizzes like Arnold have invaded Wall Street, bringing a level of scientific precision to trading and often making fortunes in the process. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, launched a similar LLC (the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) in 2015, with Zuckerberg transferring some 99 percent of his shares in the social media company to the LLCan amount reportedly exceeding $45 billion. People would read into it, and they would say hes just being cagey, DAgostino says. Nonprofits must file annual Form 990 financial reports with the IRS, disclosing their revenues, employee compensation, grant recipients, and (in the case of foundations) their donors. Ad Choices, John Arnold Made a Fortune at Enron. John E. Murray (1959-2018) wasnt famous like Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Click here to request a free trial. Together with Taubes work, Arnold was also reading Ioannidis and Goldacres equally devastating analyses. A number of the Arnolds reform efforts have focused on fixing nutrition science. The Arnolds' impact investing includes CivicaRx, which plans to manufacture 14 generic drugs and sell them cheap. The philanthropys core mission is to invest in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. Of course, this new LLC model comes with the cost of losing the Arnold Foundations tax exemption. A childhood math prodigy turned medical researcher, Ioannidis became a kind of godfather to the science reform crowd in 2005, when he published two devastating papersone of them titled simply Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. Now, with a $6 million initial grant from the Arnold Foundation, Ioannidis and his colleague Steven Goodman are setting out to turn the study of scientific practiceknown as meta-researchinto a full-fledged field in its own right, with a new research center at Stanford. John Arnold has criticized labor unions, college tuition schedules, and the New York Timess increasing contempt for free speech. But now they were widening their scope. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Centaurus Advisors. He started Centaurus the next year, bringing along a small group of former Enron traders, who worked out of a single large room. [43], John received an $8 million dollar bonus from Enron just before the company filed for bankruptcy. [29] The Foundation is focused on evidence-backed giving for systematic change. [3] [8] His father was a lawyer and died when Arnold was 18. Arnold was raised in Dallas, Texas, and he was the younger of two sons. Its probably too big a lift for us to expect were going to change researchers who have been around for decades, he says. The 13 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride, The Best Barefoot Shoes for Walking or Running, Palantirs Plan to Decipher the Mysteries of Long Covid. Reflects change since 5 pm ET of prior trading day. [emphasis added]. And in 2015 the Arnold Foundation paid journalist Nina Teicholz to investigate the scientific review process that informs the US Dietary Guidelines. (The foundations funding of the Nutrition Science Initiative is now scheduled to end in November.) In Hedge Hogs, a 2013 book about hedge fund traders, Jeff Shankman, another star trader at Enron, is quoted describing Arnold as the most thoughtful, deliberate, and inquisitive person he worked with on the gas floor. Laura tells me she sees her husbands appetite for riskan appetite she says she sharesas the most obvious link between his approach to trading and philanthropy. [8][12] His former colleagues dubbed him "king of natural gas. Much of the Arnolds philanthropy has funded causes favored by the Left, such as ranked-choice voting, litigation against supposed Republican gerrymandering in congressional maps, and the eco-Right, groups infiltrating the conservative movement with a left-wing global-warming agenda. The Search for Long Covid Treatments Takes a Promising Turn. Capital Research Center (CRC) was established in 1984 to promote a better understanding of charity and philanthropy. People who did, didnt know how to clean it up and analyze it as well as we did.. In the sciences, one is mostly incentivized to publish journal articles, and especially to publish the sorts of attention-grabbing and controversial articles that get widely cited and picked up by the popular media. While. Closing LLCs dont have foundations 5 percent annual spend-out requirements or strict investment rules. Abandoning traditional nonprofits in favor of LLCs may be the ultimate expression of donor privacy under the First Amendment, but it also means rejecting our philanthropic institutions at a time when so much of the nonprofit landscape is made up of policy groups. But he tells me that listening to Taubes and reading his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, had been an aha moment for him. His ~$3 billion fund, Centaurus, was down 4% in 2010 YTD, according. Houston-based Centaurus has been one of the most successful hedge funds in the industry, delivering a compound annual return of about 130% since it was founded by Arnold in 2002 after the collapse of Enron. A 2017 interview with Wired magazine characterized him this way: Arnold says that now, unless he trusts a researchers work, he no longer believes the findings of any scientific study until he or someone on the staff carefully vets the paper. In May 2012, John announced his retirement from Centaurus Energy to concentrate on philanthropic activities. But as a practical matter, we grew to be so large in terms of our appetite for change in our policy areas that it just became cumbersome to have a C3 group on one side and a C4 group on the other side and having them not really be able to talk to each other. Arnold is a board member of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. But consider the ramifications of a Soros Ventures, or Steyer Ventures, or Buffett Ventureslimited liability companies that could field virtually unlimited resources to lobby on foreign policy, abortion rights, illegal immigration, or health care, with almost no public transparency. Joseph (Rusty) Walter III and Paula Walter . Luce's career in natural-gas storage includes leading roles with energy and utility company Sempra Energy and with NGS Energy, a developer backed by billionaire energy trader John Arnold's Centaurus Advisors hedge fund. Philanthropy Is for the Living. Arnold, who specializes in trading natural gas, is the former Enron trader who launched Centaurus in 2002 with the $8 million bonus he received from Enron after making the firm $750 million. Updated: 12/31/2014 01:43 PM EST. For a look . Michael and Susan Dell, Austin $1 billion. In 2018, he jokingly complained that hes been called the next Koch brother by the far left press and the next George Soros by the far right.. Hardly anyone in the world of nutrition science seemed willing to question the science behind the low-fat diet, even after Americans grew fat and diabetic in record numbers. I think I was just born with a natural gift for seeing numbers in a special way, he says. What does that say about American philanthropy? No. They have personally donated to numerous Democratic campaigns, the Democratic Partys leading congressional political action committee (House Majority PAC), and both of Barack Obamas presidential campaigns. The problem, they claim, isnt that scientists dont want to do the right thing. The problem even had a name: the file drawer effect. The picture Taubes painted wasnt of a flawed study here or there but of a fundamentally broken scientific culture. Former Enron Corp. energy trader John Arnold is closing down his flagship Centaurus Energy Master Hedge Fund. He reportedly earned the company $750 million the year Enron collapsed. On the morning of October 7, 2015, the US House Agriculture Committee convened a hearing on the controversy surrounding the dietary guidelines, fueled by the BMJ article. The philanthropy's core mission is to invest in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. [15], He then founded Centaurus, a hedge fund, with his previous year's bonus in 2002. And though the fund bounced back the next year, tighter regulations on trading and a far less volatile marketthanks to a growing supply of natural gas from shale rockmade it unlikely that Arnold would again see the astonishing returns of only a few years earlier. John Arnold. Arnold Ventures is a group of more than 100 passionate people from all walks of life who feel a deep urgency to help people in need. It completely transformed what we could imagine doing, Nosek says. This article appears in the February issue. Arnold and his wife, Laura Munoz, together run the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, a major private grantmaking foundation.In early 2019 he and his wife Laura started Arnold Ventures, a for-profit limited liability company (LLC) and grantmaking organization. But if you look at the studies that cant be reproduced and other issues facing science, you start to think: What is evidence? Usually the division of labor in most of our work is that I talk, Laura Arnold says in a phone interview. [22], Arnold started donating to the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in 2004 with a gift of $30,000 which was then based in Houston, and two years later he and his wife pledged $10 million to help KIPP expand to other cities. In my conversations with Arnold and his grantees, the word incentives seems to come up more than any other. 377 on the magazines list of billionaires. However, after 17 years as an energy trader, I feel that its time to pursue other interests, Arnold wrote to investors in a letter obtained by NGI. She joins other singers on an Olivia Newton John duets album out this week. Nosek says that the cash offers were Arnolds idea. Background. IN THEIR philanthropy, the Arnolds like to say, they follow data where it leads rather than let themselves be guided by ideology. For one thing, the problems plaguing scientific research are now increasingly well known. Worse yet, whenever evidence came along that contradicted the consensus about the dangers of eating fatoften evidence that was much stronger than the evidence for the dangersit was ignored or not even published. As Nosek tells it, John Arnold had read about the Reproducibility Project in The Chronicle of Higher Education and wanted to talk. Private, non-publicly traded companies are not obligated to do any of those things. Then, one day in November 2011, he was listening to the podcast EconTalk, hosted by libertarian economist Russ Roberts. Fix terrible science. John Arnold President Houston, Texas, United States 12 followers Join to view profile Centaurus Capital Experience President - President Centaurus Capital View John's full profile See who. At its peak Centaurus managed some $6 billion before Arnold closed the fund and retired in 2012 at the age of 38, establishing the Laura and John Arnold Foundation with his wifea former oil executivesoon after. THE ARNOLDS had been dabbling in philanthropy for years, supporting a few handpicked programs in education, criminal justice reform, and other areas that were important to them. But powerful special interests are trying to question science., If John Arnold decided he wanted to beat hunger, I wouldnt want to bet on hunger.. CRC respects confidentiality and will not share your e-mail address. Billionaire John Arnold pushes for charity reform. Arnold was given $8 million, the biggest payout of all, just days before Enron filed for bankruptcy. They are on record as agreeing with some of the critiques and focus on partnering with organizations to maximize their impact without undue influence. Donald Trumps real net worth? For the rest of us, we can only hope that he continues to inspire us with his unique blend of starry-eyed optimism and rocket expertise. [23] Arnold has also given to The City Fund, an organization focused on growing the number of charter schools in the USA, and its political arm, Public School Allies.
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