Jeff Yass
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a guy who’s making $100,000 a year? They’re both at home watching Netflix and they’re both on their iPhones and they’re both listening to the same music. The disparity between how rich people live and how poor people live in America has never been smaller… Everyone is living almost the same life. Except rich people have jobs they like and poor people have jobs they don’t like, but they have all the stuff that they need to a much greater extent than ever. Jeff Yess on the Adam Smith Society podcast
Jeff Yass is the 64th richest person in the world and a Republican megadonor. While he has avoided paying upwards of $1 billion in federal income taxes, Yass has, as of May, 2024, spent more than any other individual on federal campaigns in the 2024 cycle. Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, helped fuel ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and holds a 15% stake worth an estimated $34 billion after being one of the company’s early investors. Yass could be appointed to a senior economic role in a second Trump administration and is among several leading names Trump has floated for Treasury Secretary.
Yass has called public schools a “government monopoly” and has contributed millions in attempts to elect candidates who back school privatization efforts. Last year, he also spent millions in an attempt to capture the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He has given just over $69 million to right-wing causes in the current election cycle. Yass is also a funder of numerous right-wing dark money groups such as the Club for Growth, which in 2018 and 2020, spent $20 million directly and indirectly supporting 42 of the Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the election. Yass gave Club for Growth Action $16 million last year and more than $60 million since 2018.
Yass and Club for Growth distanced themselves from Trump until earlier this year as the potential for a TikTok ban was escalating and the Trump campaign was lacking cash. In February, David McIntosh, Club for Growth President and Yass’s friend, met with Trump for dinner, and in March, McIntosh and Yass called Trump on the phone with just two hours’ notice to ask him to speak at a Club for Growth donor retreat in Palm Beach. Trump complied and had a brief meeting with Yass and his wife on the sidelines of that retreat discussing education and “school choice.”
Yass has an alleged record of pressuring Republicans to change their policy stances on TikTok behind the scenes. The Head of Public Affairs at Yass’s firm and Trump administration alum Tony Sayegh asked his friend, Trump senior adviser Jason Miller, to convince Trump to defend TikTok. In the same month, the merger between Digital World Acquisition Corp. and Trump Media & Technology Group closed, allowing Trump’s company to go public just as Trump was facing a looming deadline on his $454 million fraud penalty. This deal potentially made Yass the largest institutional shareholder in Trump Media, per the most recent reporting which showed Yass’s trading firm owned about two percent of Digital World’s shares.
One week after the merger, Trump announced a reversal of his long-held position favoring the banning of TikTok, and denounced a bill that threatened the app’s ability to operate in the U.S. Vanity Fair noted that it “looked like Trump had cynically reversed a longtime policy position to impress a major donor” and “like Yass’s firm was helping to prop up Trump Media’s stock, of which Trump holds a roughly—and highly theoretical—$5.5 billion stake.”
Yass got part of his initial wealth from gambling; he translated his strategy of accepting minor losses to maximize wins as a sports better and poker player to his trading firm, employing quantitative techniques to rapidly trade and beat the market. Yass-tied trading firms have been fined more than 160 times for violating regulatory fair market protections and have paid more than $10 million in fines. He once remarked, “If you’re not asking yourself, am I the sucker, or am I the [bait], you get arrogant and you get crushed.”