The book that Ray Dalio doesn’t want you to read

When New York Times reporter Rob Copeland signed a contract to write a biography about Ray Dalio, the founder and longtime head of the Westport-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, he contacted his subject with the news. Neither Dalio nor his company were enthusiastic, to put it mildly.

“They’ve been threatening me from before a word of this book was written,” said Copeland. “I told Ray he was the first person I told after I signed the contract. Ray and Bridgewater went out and hired three different law firms to threaten me and my publisher.”

The threats didn’t seem to work, as St. Martin’s Press just released Copeland’s “The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend.” For those who only know Dalio from his highly viewed TedTalks appearance and his LinkedIn postings where he espouses his “Principles” of creating a holistic work environment through corporate transparency, Copeland details an utterly different culture where Bridgewater workers are kept under extreme surveillance, with Dalio as a mercurial taskmaster who plays people against each other and shows no concern over humiliating his employees over the most trivial of considerations.

Indeed, Copeland highlighted how the environment within Bridgewater was so dystopian that James Comey, who served as Bridgewater’s general counsel becoming FBI director, engaged in petty entrapment tricks by leaving private binder out in the open with the goal of catching lower-level employees who stopped to read its contents.

Copeland spoke with the Business Journal regarding “The Fund.”

Congratulations on the release of your new book. Why did you decide to write a book about Ray Dalio?

I’ve been covering Ray and Bridgewater for about a decade and it just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I’ve been thinking about doing this book before he even wrote his book [“Principles: Life & Work,” published in 2017]. And then he just became so super famous by presenting this completely alternate reality of what he and Bridgewater and the Principles are like. So, honestly, I felt like if I didn’t write this, his completely fake world would be out there forever.

I’ve been covering the financial services world for a long time and I’m not familiar with any other company that functions in a manner that is vaguely similar to way in which Bridgewater operates, with its psychological abuse of the workforce. Are they literally in a class by themselves?

Ray has tried very hard to get other companies and the other billionaires that he calls his friends to use the Principles – and no one was interested in it. And that’s for good reason, because the Principles have nothing to do with a meritocracy – the evidence shows that over and over and over again, it only works to elevate Ray Dalio above everyone else.

Where did this strange corporate culture come from? In reading your book, it seems as if Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater was like China during the Cultural Revolution and his “Principles” was the business equivalent of Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

Well, he created a group inside Bridgewater that he called the Politburo, which he directly lifted from the CCP. So, I almost I almost have to say that speaks for itself.

I will say something that I was really shocked about is how obsessed he’s been with other strongmen. And I’m not a political person – I’ve always been a business reporter – but I was struck by his obsession with Putin, his obsession with China’s leadership, with [former Singapore Prime Minister] Lee Kuan Yew. There’s a moment in the book where he fakes being his own spokesman, which is straight out of Donald Trump. And, again, I hate the Donald Trump comparisons – I think we’re all tired of it by now – but in that case, it’s so spot-on that I don’t know if Ray or Donald did it first. But I can tell you that unlike Donald, Ray didn’t get caught.

What is the exact nature of Dalio’s relation with the Chinese government? He got in trouble a couple of years ago when he was downplaying the human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.

If there is I’ve learned one thing about Ray Dalio over the past decade, it’s that he’s not going to say anything that crosses an investor and he will not say a single thing that will lose him a single cent. He’s got a lot of money from the Chinese government’s related entities, and what jumped out to me in researching this book was how he started his charity and hired the former investment head of CIC [China Investment Corp.]. It’s unbelievable how deep the ties go – and, honestly, I just scratched the surface.

What was the nature of Dalio’s relationship with the various presidential administrations over the years?

I was sort of blown away – he isn’t a U.S. political person. He spends a lot of time traveling the world raising money from other countries, but he’s not been a hugely political person. Though he did attend the state dinner for [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi this year – and, of course, it’s probably not a coincidence that Bridgewater has also been aggressively trying to raise money in India.

One of the more disturbing things in the book was the sexual harassment that permeated Bridgewater. Do you know the ratio of men to women within Bridgewater, particularly in the leadership ranks?

I don’t know the exact number. But we should be fair – hedge funds are overwhelmingly male. So even if I told you it was overwhelmingly male, I think I’d be picking on him.

What I will say is that for years, there was even a joke inside Bridgewater that they just recruited X fraternity bros from Dartmouth. That was an exaggeration, of course, but they definitely have an archetype and that archetype is they bring in young people who don’t have any sense of what of what a well-rounded work environment would be. And they create this whole world around you – you spend your whole week in Westport, your friends are there. I left so much out of the book about the interpersonal relationships there because I just didn’t want it to be that kind of book. But there are a number of people who cheated on their spouses and married another Bridgewater person – they really require you to devote your whole life.

A couple of years ago, Dalio’s philanthropy was involved in a partnership with the Connecticut state government in an endeavor to boost the quality of local education – almost immediately after it began, Dalio pulled out and complained of was political interference from Republican legislators involved in the endeavor. Is this just Dalio not being a good team player?

Anytime Ray doesn’t get what Ray wants, he pulls out. And, by the way, Ray then hired one of Ned Lamont’s top deputies to work for Bridgewater.

How did you get the trust of the Bridgewater people who provided you with information on the inner workings of Bridgewater?

There is a tremendous amount of frustration, even with people who have fond feelings for Ray, that he’s created this alternative reality and that he’s convinced the world that he and Bridgewater and the principles are one way – when it’s nothing like that. In a way, he made my job easier because he just kept going on television and podcasts and spewing nonsense.

Many people who spoke to me are still there and they just want to just want to be done with Ray Dalio and the Principles. They just want to be done with this whole fiction. I like to say that I wrote the first nonfiction book about Ray Dalio and the Principles.

What is Dalio’s relation with Bridgewater now?

Well, he allegedly retired last year. And I’ve reported in the Times that despite what he said publicly, there was a lot of tension behind the scenes and that he extracted a lot of money to do so. Here’s what I would say – no matter what his alleged full role or title is, who has the power at Bridgewater? Is it the person who has the title of CEO or CIO or whatever, at any point? Or is it the one guy who can go on any television network or write on LinkedIn to say “I don’t have faith in the people leading Bridgewater anymore” and the whole thing crumbles. So, who is really in charge?

Amazon picked up the rights to turn this into either a film or a streaming series. Who do you think would be the best actor to play Ray Dalio?

That’s something I spent a long time thinking about. He looks a lot like Kevin Costner. He also looks like Henry Winkler. But those are both superficial suggestions, for whoever plays him needs to be able to seamlessly be charming and soft and kind, and then be able to very instantly switch to being cool – when you almost can’t even notice the switch has happened. I met with a lot of different producers who are interested and when I told all of them is you can’t cast a villain. In “Bad Blood,” a tremendous book about Elizabeth Holmes, she’s crooked from the first page. Ray is much more complicated than that, much darker. He when he screams at you, it’s after he’s already pulled you in for a hug.

Would you think he’d be a great James Bond villain?

Maybe, but I don’t think I’d make a very good James Bond!