Stanley Druckenmiller is revered on Wall Street.
The veteran investor has not had a down year in three decades of running his own hedge fund or at the family office he has subsequently overseen for 14 years, according to people familiar with his returns.
Now the 71-year-old billionaire’s influence is extending beyond the world of high finance, with two of his protégés firmly established within Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Through Scott Bessent, the US president’s Treasury secretary, and Kevin Warsh, a leading contender to be the next Federal Reserve chair, Druckenmiller’s views on economic policy have suddenly become more consequential.
The founder of Duquesne Capital Management and alumnus of George Soros’s hedge fund remains in regular contact with Bessent and Warsh, according to people familiar with the relationships.
Those close to Druckenmiller describe him as having an uncanny ability to identify promising trades and to swiftly modify his position when circumstances require.
“In macro, there’s Stan and then there’s everybody else,” Bessent told the Financial Times, adding that Druckenmiller stood apart from the pack “in terms of performance, in terms of reverence and in terms of analysis”.
Less than two months into his second term, Trump has exploded the norms of international finance on which macro traders such as Druckenmiller have long thrived, upending global trade through a raft of tariffs, tearing up anti-bribery rules and veering towards protectionism.
While Druckenmiller has supported other Republicans, he did not donate to Trump’s campaign and in October described the then-candidate as a “blowhard”. But he now has a direct line to the administration’s most important economic thinkers.
After high school in Virginia, Druckenmiller went to Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in Maine, before getting a job in 1976 at Pittsburgh National Bank, where he developed an affinity for both the industrial Pennsylvania city and investing. While working for the regional lender, he started Duquesne with about $800,000.
Druckenmiller received his big break in 1988 when George Soros hired him for his hedge fund, where he stayed until 2000 when he broke out on his own to run Duquesne full-time.
He first hired Bessent at Soros Fund Management more than three decades ago. Alongside Soros the two went on to make an infamous windfall for the firm by shorting the British pound in a 1992 move that went down in history as the trade that “broke the Bank of England”. Bessent then started his own hedge fund, Key Square Capital, which launched with money from Druckenmiller.
Warsh has worked as partner at Duquesne since 2011 — when Druckenmiller converted it into a family office — after quitting his previous role as a Fed governor over policy disagreements.
In 2017 Warsh lost out to Jay Powell as Trump’s replacement for Janet Yellen as Fed chair. More recently he was also in contention for the role of Treasury secretary, creating a briefly awkward dance between the Druckenmiller protégés, who also have a close relationship.
While Druckenmiller has mentored dozens of investors during his long career, he is especially close to Bessent and Warsh, according to people familiar with the matter, two of whom described their ties as akin to father-son relationships.
Druckenmiller and Warsh communicate constantly, say people familiar with their relationship, digesting new information in texts or quick calls, sometimes speaking more than a dozen times a day.
Bessent also remains in frequent contact, according to people familiar with their communications, although they said the nature of the calls was now different, with only Druckenmiller sharing his views on the market.
The pair embody the way Druckenmiller interprets markets and economic policy, say people familiar with their discussions, with Warsh and Bessent echoing “Stan’s language” to relay their own positions.
Druckenmiller and Warsh declined to comment.
Over the years Druckenmiller has not been shy about sharing his views on economic policy — especially since closing his hedge fund to outside investors.
For more than a decade he has fixated on the US budget deficit, which he has described as a “debt bomb”. He has excoriated what he sees as excessive spending on entitlements such as Social Security and healthcare assistance programmes Medicaid and Medicare. And during the pandemic he publicly criticised the Fed for waiting too long to raise interest rates, which allowed inflation to surge.
He does not always get it right. Having repeatedly warned of looming US recessions that never came to pass, Druckenmiller joked at a conference in October that he had forecast six of the past four, admitting that “I’ve been predicting a recession for, like, ever”.
Some of Druckenmiller’s views clash with Trump’s purported plans. The president’s proposed tax cuts, for example — including slashing those on tips, overtime and Social Security payments — do not bode well for the national debt of more than $36tn and rising.
However, Druckenmiller is supportive of Trump’s cost-cutting efforts since taking office, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Druckenmiller’s clients rave about him. Billionaire Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, who met Druckenmiller when he was at Pittsburgh National Bank and invested in Duquesne decades ago, described Druckenmiller as a “genius” and “the best investor I’ve ever known,” praising both his “character” and “integrity”.
Langone said that the same day he spoke to the Financial Times in early February he had talked to Druckenmiller, discussing “all the things that Trump is doing” — both what they are “preponderantly pleased” and bothered by, although he declined to describe the details.
Druckenmiller did not support Trump’s re-election, saying during the campaign that the industrial policies of both the Republican candidate and his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris were “equally bad”.
“I grew up in America with a certain model of a president — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan was one in my lifetime — where there was a certain dignity and behaviour in the office,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview in October. “I don’t judge anyone who wants to vote for Trump but for me it’s just a red line, so I’ll probably write in someone when I go to the polls.”
Wall Street insiders also hold Druckenmiller in high regard.
“If I were a policymaker — if I were in Treasury or the Fed or whatever — I would want [Druckenmiller’s] opinion, because he just has a very keen understanding for what the markets are saying,” said one top banker. “He can really divine the signals of markets.”
Another veteran investor said: “Stan can read the market in ways that nobody else can. He’s an iconoclast who never takes anything for granted, including his own views and beliefs . . . That allows him to be agile and pivot quickly, turning a bad situation into a win for him.”
But while Druckenmiller has many fans, some observers have raised concerns about the drawback of possibly having two of the nation’s top economic policymakers possessing a similar worldview.
“There are echoes here of the past,” said Andrew Levin, a professor at Dartmouth College who formerly worked at the Fed as a special adviser on monetary policy. “When you have a lot of people who all view things the same way and those people are making the decisions, there’s just a risk of big mistakes.”
Either way, whoever Trump decides to appoint at the Fed in 2026, “Druckonomics”, as one banker put it, is set to be more influential than ever.
