John Paulson was born in Queens in 1955 to Jacqueline, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, and Alfredo Paulson, an Ecuadorian orphan who served and was wounded in Italy in World War II. After dropping out of college for sales, he returned to NYU, graduated valedictorian in 1978, and became a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School in 1980. He worked at Boston Consulting Group, with Leon Levy at Odyssey Partners, in mergers at Bear Stearns, and at Gruss Partners, then founded Paulson & Co. in 1994 with $2 million and one employee. Merger arbitrage grew the fund to $300 million by 2003.

Seeing a housing market built on weak loans, Paulson bought credit default swaps on subprime mortgages and personally made more than $4 billion in the collapse. He helped select assets for Goldman Sachs’ Abacus 2007-AC1, which Goldman sold without disclosing his short position; the SEC sued Goldman, which settled for $550 million, while Paulson was not charged and his firm said it was transparent with Goldman. He made nearly $5 billion on gold in 2010, then lost heavily in 2011 on Bank of America, Citigroup and the China-based forestry firm Sino-Forest, suspected of fraud.

• He gave $400 million to Harvard’s engineering school in 2015 and $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy in 2012.
• A single April 2024 fundraiser at his Palm Beach home raised a reported $50.5 million for Donald Trump’s campaign.
• In June 2026 Conn-Selmer, owned by his firm, moved brass instrument production from Ohio to China despite his public criticism of offshoring.
• In 2017 he and Jenny Zaharia sent the Spence School a letter threatening to withdraw support over what they called anti-white indoctrination.
• As of 2025, a holding company he controls is working to revive an abandoned gold mine in Idaho.