The entire story:
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...
Lots of interesting information on the internet about him too:
We grew up in a world dotted with buildings and universities with the names of robber-barons like Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. Having your name carved into the stone of the building of a major institution means immortality (well, as long as the institution remains important) - directly sponsoring science might do more real good but it's not as good at sanitising your image or for being remembered long term, which are the real goals of most billionaires' philanthropy.
People don't remember John D. Rockefeller for the money he pumped into eradicating hookworm, probably the single greatest thing he did for the world in his life - ending generations of sapped energy and cognitive impairment in the American South. People remember him because his name is on the buildings and colleges he funded.
He didn't pay to put his name on one or two libraries in influential universities, he paid to set up a national system of libraries which any person could walk into and make use of.
Why haven't any of our tycoons stepped up to create a national system of community centers, makerspaces, etc? I'll give you three guesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Heavy_Ion_Collide...
https://www.aip.org/fyi/2006/brookhaven-receives-outside-fun...
- "Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Praveen Chaudhari has announced a $13-million private contribution that will enable the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to operate for 20 full weeks this year. The money was raised by Jim Simons..."
At one point, there was a “Kickstarter” for science but I haven’t gotten an email from them for years.
The list goes on and on. These things just aren’t widely reported because they are boring and don’t fit narratives favored by much of the press.
"An article published in The New York Times in 2015 said that Simons was involved in one of the biggest tax battles of the year, with Renaissance Technologies being "under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade."[46] In September 2021, it was announced that Simons and his colleagues would pay billions of dollars in back taxes, interest and penalties to resolve the dispute, one of the biggest in IRS history"
(...)
"In total, Simons has given over $2.7 billion to philanthropic cause"
RenTec's secret sauce has always been their tax attorneys, not their quants. Prior to this "retirement fund" issue, RenTec was notorious for tax avoidance schemes like claiming LT capital gains on basket options.
In any event, their secret sauce has always been teamwork and infrastructure.
People fail to remember that Simons created a world class math department at stony brook from scratch. He knows how to put smart people together and have them work together.