The George Soros Social Set

George Soros (b. 1930) built the fortune, and the family now runs on a second-generation logic. The father broke the Bank of England in 1992 and then spent decades giving the money away through the Open Society Foundations, a roughly $25 billion apparatus. The son, Alexander Soros (b. 1985), chairs the Open Society Foundations and has become the family’s political face. Huma Abedin (b. 1975) spent twenty years at Hillary Clinton’s (b. 1947) side, close enough that people called her the former secretary of state’s second daughter. Alex married Abedin on June 14, 2025, after an eleven-month engagement. The wedding tells you almost everything about the set. It drew private jets, fleets of black SUVs, Clinton aides, and high-profile Democrats from Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi to a Soros family estate in the Hamptons.
What they value is access. Not money for its own sake, since the money is assumed, but proximity to the people who decide things. The Clintons at the rehearsal dinner, the Met Gala photographs, the chairmanship passed from father to son like a seat in a parliament of one family. The currency of this world is the invitation. Who gets photographed next to whom. Whose cause gets funded this cycle. Bill Clinton (b. 1946) in the room confers more than any check. They value discretion paired with visibility, the ability to move money and influence quietly while appearing in Vogue.
Their hero is the benefactor. The whole self-understanding flows from George’s biography. A boy who survived Nazi occupation in Budapest, then watched Soviet rule close behind it, then escaped and made himself rich, then spent the fortune funding the open society against the closed one. That story turns a currency speculator into a man who shapes the moral arc of nations. Alex inherits the role and plays it more partisan than his father, more comfortable in the Biden White House, more willing to be the donor who steers American elections. Abedin’s heroism runs on a different track. Hers is loyalty and endurance. The indispensable aide. The woman who survived two rounds of public humiliation through her former husband Anthony Weiner (b. 1964) and rose with her dignity arranged. Her memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, frames her as a woman who bridges worlds and emerges whole. Service is the heroism. Proximity to greatness becomes a form of greatness.
The status games run on faith and pedigree at once. The couple signed a Nikah for Abedin’s Muslim faith and a Ketubah for Alex’s Jewish heritage. The interfaith ceremony reads as a status claim. It says the union transcends old divisions, that these two carry their traditions lightly and combine them by choice. The guest list is the scoreboard. A former vice president, a former speaker, a former president and his wife. You measure your standing by how many of these people answer your invitation.
Now the normative claims. They hold that the open society is good and the closed society is the enemy. Pluralism, tolerance, the rights of refugees and migrants, criminal justice reform, the defense of democracy against populism. The frame is always progress against reaction. They place themselves on the side of history and cast their opponents as the forces of fear. The giving is moral, not political, even when it funds prosecutors and presidents. To them the distinction holds.
The essentialist claims sit underneath. They treat their own preferences as universal human values rather than the program of one faction. Open society is not their politics, in their telling, but the natural endpoint of human flourishing, an inheritance George took from Karl Popper (1902-1994). They treat themselves as a natural elite, the educated and enlightened, the people fit to steward the rest. Abedin’s both/and framing essentializes her dual belonging into a moral authority, as though standing between worlds makes a man or woman more trustworthy than the people rooted in one. The interfaith wedding does the same work. It treats the blending of traditions as virtue by definition.
The truth they will not say plainly is that the open society program and the consolidation of their own power point the same direction. The philanthropy funds the politics. The politics protects the fortune. The fortune buys the access. The family describes a vocation. An outsider sees a machine that keeps a small set of people near the center of American decision while telling everyone, including themselves, that the arrangement serves humanity.