Non-fiction corner: Ever had a horrible boss? ‘The Fund’ is the perfect rage-read

By Mark Gimein

NEW YORK: Ray Dalio is the titan behind the world’s biggest hedge fund — a deep thinker and confidant of some of Earth’s most powerful people. Now 74, he has worked diligently over the past few years to publicize his “Principles,” perhaps in the hope that his name will live on. In “The Fund,” Rob Copeland has done him the favor of assuring that it will — attached to one of the pettiest bullies you’ll ever meet on the page. This is a terrific dagger of a book packed with cringey detail, just long enough to efficiently disembowel its subject.

Most of “The Fund” doesn’t feel like a book about finance. Instead, it is about how a man of surpassing mediocrity used money to control and humiliate, and how much people abased themselves for it. Which, come to think of it, makes it one of the better books ever written about Wall Street.

The early chapters cover Dalio’s rise from middle-class striver to captain of finance, a journey begun, in time-honored fashion, by caddying at the local golf club. The links proved an excellent place to cultivate a talent for sycophancy, and Dalio was taken under the wing of a well-connected family. After business school and gaining visibility by boldly predicting an impending depression, Dalio eventually got off the ground a fund — Bridgewater — that promised to invest clients’ money safely.

This looming depression, always imminent, has never come — but by regularly forecasting economic downturns, he has gotten credit for anticipating a few. He had a successful stretch of investing through the 1990s and into the 2000s, and in the wake of the 2008 crash, his hedge fund became the single largest in the world. Thus Dalio was able to turn to his true life’s work: subjecting the 1,600-odd people who worked for him to ever more baroque and dystopic psychological manipulations.

This is roughly where Copeland, now a reporter at The New York Times, jumps in. Some of the Bridgewater panopticon story has been told before, notably by Copeland himself. But even if you think you’ve already heard everything about this crazy hedge fund that videotapes employee interactions so they can critique one another under the flag of “radical transparency,” know this: There is so much more.

To appreciate the full impact of the Connecticut struggle sessions, you’ll need a little bit of jargon: For much of Bridgewater’s history, every employee has received a “baseball card” with ratings of their abilities or character, to which their colleagues contribute. And contributing ratings — or “dots” — is itself a key metric; there are rewards handed out to bullies and informants.

You might think that the result of this system would be a wholesome cycle of self-improvement through honesty and informed introspection. But oddly the outcome is a climate of paranoia and punishment that comes down hardest on the weakest.

There was, for instance, the incident of the wrinkled peas in the cafeteria, in which a written complaint whipped the vegetables into “pristine” shape. There was the time when the parking staff was fired for designing parking passes deemed too big. When Dalio noticed a spill on the floor by his urinal, Copeland writes, he summoned a deputy to investigate.