>>10747279 $138 Billion Bridgewater Set Up 50 "Tent Offices" In The Woods Outside Of Its HQ For Its Traders
The Weird Hedge Fund That Prepared James Comey for His Capitol Hill Hot Seat
“”After he left government, Comey spent three years being grilled, or “probed,” as an executive at Bridgewater Associates, the $150 billion hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio that the New Yorker has labeled “the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund.” Dalio, who regularly ranks among the 50 or 60 wealthiest people on the Forbes 400 list, has built the highly successful fund since the 1970s on a platform of “radical transparency,” a principle that encourages—actually forces—deep questioning from the ranks of all leadership decisions.” “It was just weeks after he joined Bridgewater—whose corporate culture of high-achieving intellectuals resembles a moneyed management cult that shares more in common with the 1970s personal-improvement fad est than it does with a typical Wall Street firm—that Comey was cornered by a similarly new 25-year-old employee. The junior associate interrogated the former Justice Department official on a seemingly illogical stance that Comey had taken in an earlier meeting. “My initial reaction was ‘What? You, kid, are asking me that question?’ ... I was deputy attorney general of the United States; I was general counsel of a huge, huge company. No 25-year-old is going to ask me about my logic,” he recalled. “Then I realized ‘I’m at Bridgewater.’”
Comey said that, even though he was excited to embrace the new way of thinking, it took him at least three months to settle in with Bridgewater’s culture. “I finally relaxed and untied the knot in my stomach that would instantly appear when someone questioned me,” he recalled. “Bridgewater’s a hard place. … It’s a place filled with really smart people who are always going to tell you the truth, and that’s hard.” Inside Bridgewater, the culture of questioning is known as “probing,” a chance to understand the deeper “whys” inherent in an individual’s thinking or a corporate process. It’s a chance for everyone, from junior associates right up to Dalio himself, to force people past easy answers or glib statements into tight, rigorous thinking. “At Bridgewater, every day is a kind of after-action review, although the process goes much deeper than a typical postmortem,” business writers Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey concluded in their book. Inside Bridgewater, where the “Culture of the Probe” reigns, meetings are even recorded, to force accountability for people’s statements and commitments.
In a corporate video still on Bridgewater’s website, a cashmere sweater-clad Comey discusses the hedge fund’s emphasis on transparency and accountability: “I’ve been ‘probed’ in this strange field trip through life that I’ve had a lot of different places. I’ve testified in court, I have briefed the president of the United States repeatedly, I’ve argued in front of the United States Supreme Court, and I’ve been probed at Bridgewater. And Bridgewater is by far the hardest,” Comey says. “You combine that intelligence, the depth and the almost 360 [degree] vector of the questioning, there is no more demanding, probing, questioning environment in the world than Bridgewater.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/fbi-director-james-comey-house-of-representatives-investigation-hillary-clinton-emails-chaffetz-hedge-fund-214018
Bridgewater "Manufactured False Evidence" To Crush Potential Competitors. And Was Jim Comey Involved?
Who knew that part of Ray Dalio's "radical transparency" fetish was accusing potential competitors of stealing trade secrets, and when there is no theft, to radically fabricate "evidence" to shut them down?
While it has long been known that in the annals of active management lore, not one hedge fund comes even close to pursuing non-compete clauses and trade secrets lawsuits against its former employees with the same ferocity, tenacity and unbridled glee as the world's biggest hedge fund Bridgewater (despite valiant attempts by RenTec and Citadel they are at best runners up), what nobody knew until now, is that when Bridgewater was lacking enough legal facts on its side, it would resort to simply fabricating them. That's what the world's biggest hedge fund
According to humiliating - to Ray Dalio - court documents which were made public on Monday, and which quote findings from a panel of three arbitrators, Bridgewater - which manages $138BN in assets, and whose billionaire founder prides in the way "radical transparency" is shoved down all employees' throats - was found to have "filed its claims in reckless disregard of its own internal records, and in order to support its allegations of access to trade secrets, manufactured false evidence".
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bridgewater-manufactured-false-evidence-crush-potential-competitors-and-was-jim-comey