Robert Leroy Mercer (born July 11, 1946)[ is an American hedge fund manager, computer scientist, and political donor. Mercer was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer and is the former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.]
Mercer played a controversial role in the Brexit campaign, led by Dominic Cummings, with £3.9 million being spent on his data analytics and machine learning company AggregateIQ. [ The article has a disclaimer stating: "This article is the subject of legal complaints on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited."] He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News,
In November 2017, Mercer announced he would step down from Renaissance Technologies and sell his stake in Breitbart News to his daughters.
Early life and education
Mercer grew up in New Mexico. He developed an early interest in computers and in 1964 attended a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia where he learned to program a donated IBM computer.
Career
Mercer joined IBM Research in the fall of 1972 and worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he helped develop Brown clustering, a statistical machine translation technique, as part of a speech recognition and translation research program led by Frederick Jelinek and Lalit Bahl.[ video]
In 1993, Mercer joined hedge fund Renaissance Technologies after being recruited by executive Nick Patterson.[ Renaissance's main fund, Medallion, earned 39% per year on average from 1989 to 2006.]
In 2014, a bipartisan Senate panel estimated that Medallion investors underpaid their taxes by some $6.8 billion over more than a decade, by masking short-term gains as long-term returns.[ In November 2017, Mercer announced that he would be stepping down from his position at Renaissance Technologies. The decision was taken after the hedge fund faced a backlash over Mercer's political activism.]
Mercer appears in the Paradise Papers as a director of eight Bermuda companies, some of which appear to have been used to legally avoid US taxes.
Political activities and views
In 2015, The Washington Post called Mercer one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics.
Mercer has given $750,000 to the Club for Growth, $2 million to American Crossroads,[
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Mercer joined the Koch brothers’ conservative political donor network after the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC, but Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, decided to establish their own political foundation.
Mercer has donated to The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Media Research Center, Reclaim New York, GAI, and Citizens for Self-Governance.[Zuckerman, Gregory, Keach Hagey, Scott Patterson and Rebecca Ballhaus, "Meet the Mercers: A Quiet Tycoon and His Daughter Become Power Brokers in Trump’s Washington" (subscription), The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2017. Retrieved 2017-01-08.][
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Mercer was the main financial backer of the Jackson Hole Summit, a "shadow" conference (not to be confused with a similarly named Federal Reserve conference) that took place in Wyoming in August 2015 to advocate for the gold standard.[ He has also supported Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, Fred Kelly Grant (an Idaho activist who encourages legal challenges to environmental laws), a campaign for the death penalty in Nebraska, and funded ads in New York critical of the so-called "ground-zero mosque".][
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According to associates interviewed by Bloomberg, Mercer is concerned with the monetary and banking systems of the United States, which he believes are in danger from government meddling.[ Mercer is a major source of funds of Breitbart News.]
In 2015 Mercer also gave $400,000 to Black Americans for a Better Future, a conservative think tank led by Raynard Jackson.
Brexit
Mercer was an activist in Brexit campaign for the United Kingdom to end its membership of the European Union, also known as Brexit. Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, said that Mercer donated the services of Data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage, the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The firm was able to advise Leave.EU through its ability to harvest data from people's Facebook profiles in order to target them with individualized persuasive messages to vote for Brexit.
It has been reported that Cambridge Analytica has undisclosed links to Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ, which also played a pivotal role in Dominic Cummings' Vote Leave campaign, where he delivered an estimated one billion individually curated targeted adverts to voters in the lead up to the Brexit referendum, in contravention of established voting rules. Neither Vote Leave nor Leave.EU informed the UK electoral commission of the donation despite the fact that a law demands that all donations valued over £7,500 must be reported. In 2018, the (UK) Electoral Commission found the Vote Leave campaign guilty of breaking electoral law.
2016 U.S. election
Mercer was one of the biggest donors in the 2016 U.S. elections, donating $22.5 million to Republican candidates and PACs.
Mercer and his daughter Rebekah helped to obtain senior roles in the Trump campaign for Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.[ Mercer also financed a Super PAC, Make America Number One, which supported Trump's campaign.]
JD Vance
Mercer's family donated an undisclosed amount to the super PAC Protect Ohio Values which was established to support JD Vance for his 2022 election to a Senate seat in Ohio.[ After Mercer support for Parler beginning in 2018, Vance, who founded Narya Capital, allegedly provided advice concerning Parler to Mercer's daughter Rebekah Mercer.]
Race relations
Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racism.
In popular culture
Mercer was portrayed by actor Aden Gillett in the 2019 HBO and Channel 4 produced drama entitled .
Personal life
Mercer and his wife Diana Lynne Dean have three daughters:
Mercer plays competitive poker and owns an HO scale model railroad.[ In 2009, Mercer filed suit against RailDreams Custom Model Railroad Design, alleging that RailDreams overcharged him by $2 million.]
Mercer lives at "Owl's Nest" mansion in Head of the Harbor, New York.[ He has commissioned a series of yachts, all named Sea Owl.]
In Florida, Mercer built a large stable and horse riding center. He has acquired one of the country's largest collections of machine guns and historical firearms, including a weapon Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in The Terminator.[
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In 2013, Mercer was sued by several members of his household staff, who accused him of docking their wages and failing to pay overtime compensation.[
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Mercer's net worth is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, and he is often referred to as a billionaire.
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