From Mother Jones: When Republicans make their pilgrimages to Wall Street for money to help take back the Senate next year, there may be no hotter ticket than a party at Paul Singer’s. The 69-year-old hedge fund billionaire’s co-op apartment at the Beresford, a hulking Italian Renaissance building on Central Park West whose celebrity residents have included Jerry Seinfeld, Glenn Close, and Helen Gurley Brown, can draw scads of high-finance players. The haul for a dinner event has been known to run to $1.4 million, and Singer himself has no trouble writing a $1 million check to a super-PAC. He’s been described as a “fundraising terrorist” for his persistence in twisting arms, a skill that has helped drive a major strategic shift among Big Finance donors, who favored Obama in 2008 but now overwhelmingly back the GOP.
Singer has a professorial mien and close-cropped beard that give him a passing resemblance to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. A hardline free-marketeer with political roots in the Barry Goldwater era, he despises the Obama administration’s push to tighten financial regulations. At a 2010 dinner for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank whose board he chairs, he blasted “indiscriminate attacks by political leaders against anything that moves in the world of finance.” Singer’s $21 billion Elliott Management is one of many firms that face tougher oversight due to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, the sweeping financial-services overhaul that he’d like to see repealed. Elliott has been called a “vulture fund” because a chunk of its profits comes from buying distressed companies’ or countries’ debt at a steep discount and then playing hardball—including, in one case, detaining the flagship of Argentina’s navy—to extract payment.
The trifecta of big checks, high-powered connections, and influence in GOP policy circles has made Singer a kind of triple threat. “Singer is the big power broker in the Republican financial world,” says one operative who knows him. “He’s involved with almost everything.” Fortune described him as “a passionate defender of the 1%.” In practical terms, notes one conservative donor, “if you write checks as big as Singer’s, you can be close to anyone.”
