Louis Bacon Biography

Louis Moore Bacon (born July 25, 1956) is an American hedge fund manager, trader and founder of Moore Capital Management.

Early life and education

Bacon was born in Raleigh, North Carolina; his father, Zachary Bacon Jr., founded real estate company Bacon & Co. and later led Prudential Financial's and Merrill Lynch's real estate efforts in North Carolina

Bacon graduated from Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont where he received his B.A. in American literature, graduating Cum laude in 1979. Bacon met Walter Frank while he was working on a fishing boat in Long Island and got a job clerking at the specialist firm Walter N. Frank & Co during the summers of his college years. He subsequently received his MBA degree in finance at Columbia Business School in 1981.

While at Columbia, Bacon traded commodities using a low interest loan he had received. During the first three semesters, he lost money and was forced to borrow money from his parent to pay for necessities. However, he eventually turned a profit during his fourth semester.

Career

After receiving his MBA, Bacon joined the sales and trading program at Bankers Trust. Later he left the firm and returned to Walter N. Frank & Co. where he traded currencies. Bacon then got a job on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange, working as a "runner". Bacon later worked as a broker and trader of financial futures at Shearson Lehman Brothers and eventually became the senior vice president for their futures trading division.

In 1987 Bacon founded Remington Trading Partners and his insights into the market crash of that era allowed him to profit as the market declined as well as during its rebound some time later. In 1989, Bacon used his middle name in founding Moore Capital Management LLC and in 1990 created Moore Global Investments using the $25,000 he inherited from his family.

In 2006, Forbes names Bacon as the 746th richest person in the world. and in 2011 he was listed as the 736th richest man. In 2010, the Denver Post reported that his $1.6 billion ranked him as the 238th richest American.

Philanthropy

In 1992, Bacon created The Moore Charitable Foundation (MCF) to provide financial support to nonprofit organizations that work to preserve and protect wildlife habitat and improve water systems. Bacon has donated more than one million dollars to the environmental non-profit organization Riverkeeper.

In June 2012, United States Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar and United States Fish and Wildlife Service Director Daniel M. Ashe announced Bacon intends to donate a conservation easement totaling approximately 90,000 acres in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains bordering the San Luis Valley in Colorado. This easement will provide the foundation for the proposed new Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area.

Bacon owns the Trinchera Blanca Ranch located in the San Luis Valley. The Trinchera section of the ranch is currently protected by an easement administered by Colorado Open Lands. The new conservation easement Bacon intends to donate is to protect Blanca " thus protecting all 172,000 acres of land.

In addition to his work in Colorado, Bacon has helped preserve and protect environmentally sensitive land in New York, North Carolina, and the Bahamas. His key conservation projects include:

• Robins Island, Long Island, NY: After purchasing the "Jewel of the Peconic" in 1993, Bacon secured the permanent protection of the land through a conservation easement and set about restoring a natural habitat that had been deteriorating for 300 years.

• Cow Neck Farm, Long Island, NY: Bacon's Cow Neck Preserve, LLC purchased the farm in 1998 and donated a 540-acre conservation easement to the Peconic Land Trust, thus preventing development and ensuring the protection of the area's habitat.

Personal life

In 1986 Bacon married Cynthia Pigott, a former Newsweek magazine staff member whom he later divorced in 2002. They had four children together. In 2007, he married Gabrielle Sacconaghi in Manhattan.

In 1991 Bacon was 20th on the list of Financial World's, Top 100 Wall Street Earners list.

In November 2007, Bacon purchased the Trinchera Ranch in Costilla County, Colorado from the Forbes family. The property sold for $175 million.

In March 2010 Forbes Magazine estimated Bacon's net worth to be $1.5 billion and the 655th richest person in the world.

In 2010, Bacon purchased the Orton Plantation Gardens in North Carolina which was built in by his ancestor, Roger Moore, in 1735.

In May 2011, the High Court in London granted Bacon a court order to obtain information from the Wikimedia Foundation, The Denver Post newspaper, and WordPress as to the identities of internet users alleged to have defamed him. Legal experts suggested compliance with the orders was unlikely, given the US tradition of freedom of speech, and the fact that US courts typically required "actual evidence or sufficient allegations of libel" before granting similar orders.