Ray Dalio was born in Queens, New York, in 1949 and founded Bridgewater Associates from his apartment in 1975. Over five decades he built it into one of the largest hedge funds in the world, best known for the All Weather portfolio framework and for an idiosyncratic management culture organized around 'radical transparency'.
Dalio stepped back from day-to-day investment leadership in 2022, but his publications — including 'Principles', 'Big Debt Crises' and 'The Changing World Order' — have become reference texts for policymakers and chief investment officers attempting to think about long-cycle debt dynamics and great-power transitions.
His public voice now sits between the worlds of finance, geopolitics and historical analysis, and he is frequently invited to brief governments on the macroeconomic implications of accelerated geopolitical fragmentation.