Chris Rocco is one of the UK’s most successful hedge fund managers – an achievement the billionaire attributes to the educational opportunities he has received over the years, including a scholarship to Eton and an Oxford degree. Now, Rokos is giving back to his country’s education system through a staggering £190 million ($251 million) gift to the University of Cambridge. The funds, which will establish a government school, make up the largest gift ever to a British university in modern times, according to the 817-year-old institution.
The Rokos School of Government opens its doors this fall with an inaugural batch of Ph.D. and Master’s students. Its mission will be to prepare future leaders to navigate politics amid a rapidly changing world filled with polarization, economic transformations and new technologies.
“I was fortunate to be given the opportunity of an education that transformed my life and I would like to give something back to Britain,” Rokos said in a statement. “My hope is that, over time, the influence of the Rokos School of Government around the world will become an important element of the soft power that has been a great asset to the UK.
Rokos, 55, is the founder of Rokos Capital Management, which today manages more than $22 billion in assets, and previously helped launch Brevan Howard Asset Management. But his trajectory to hedge fund success began in more modest surroundings: Rokos attended a state primary school before winning a scholarship to Eton, one of the UK’s most prestigious boarding schools. He later studied mathematics at Oxford before starting his investment banking career in UBS, Goldman Sachs AND Credit Suisse.
Rokos, who currently has one Estimated net worth is $2.3 billionhas agreed to make an initial gift of £130 million ($172 million) to Cambridge. This donation will be followed by further gifts of £60 million ($79 million) to be matched by the school, which is also contributing land to the West Cambridge Innovation District in which the institution will be located.
The record donation is the latest multimillion-dollar gift to UK universities, putting Rokos alongside a small group wealthy, philanthropically minded financiers. Stephen SchwarzmanCEO of The Black Stonegave £150 million ($198 million) to Oxford for a humanities center in 2019, the same year that David Hardinghead of the Winton Group, donated £100 million ($132 million) to Cambridge to support a scholarship system. Other high-profile gifts to UK schools have included a $210 million donation Bill Gates AND Melinda French Gates to fund an international scholarship scheme in Cambridge and £75 million ($99 million) from the oil tycoon Leonard Blavatnik to establish a government school at Oxford.
This is not the first time that Rokos has spent his wealth towards education. He has funded scholarships at Eton, educational initiatives at Oxford and bursaries and bursaries at Cambridge. Outside of education, institutions such as Amnesty International, WaterAid and Chatham House have also benefited from the billionaire’s philanthropy.
His newest gift will bring academics from across politics, science, economics, history, engineering and statistics together to join the new school’s growing faculty, which will also include experts in government and business, finance and public service. The search for the dean of the Rokos School of Government will begin soon.
“We need a wide diversity of thought and intellectual views,” Rocco said in a video accompanying the donation announcement. “If this school was populated only by centrist, socially liberal people like myself, then the school would have failed.”
