Ray Dalio on Corporate Governance

The handover of Bridgewater stretched over nearly a decade and ended in complete separation. Dalio served as co-chief executive for ten months before a March 2017 announcement that a company-wide shakeup would take him out of the co-CEO seat by April 15. His voting rights passed to Bridgewater's board in September 2022, when he also relinquished the co-chief investment officer post, completing his operational exit. He sold his last shares in Bridgewater and left its board in 2025, ending a run of nearly five decades. He then began managing his personal investments directly through the Dalio Family Office, serving as its de facto chief investment officer, recruiting former Bridgewater research leader Steven Kryger as co-chief investment officer for global macro strategy and former JPMorgan Chase executive Alma DeMetropolis as deputy chief executive officer. In early 2026 the family office disclosed its first United States stock portfolio since the pandemic through a regulatory filing, roughly 503 million dollars with more than three-quarters allocated to gold-based exchange-traded funds.

The middle 2010s tested the firm's stability. Over 2014 to 2016 the University of California's Regents pulled 550 million dollars from Bridgewater over concerns about the firm's future leadership. In 2016 Connecticut approved 22 million dollars in grants and loans through a program initiated by Governor Dannel Malloy, in exchange for job training, job creation, building renovations, and retaining the 1,402 jobs the firm supported in the state, along with 30 million dollars in urban tax credits. That year the firm managed about 150 billion dollars. In October 2017 Grant's Interest Rate Observer published The Face on the Wall Street Milk Carton, sharply criticizing Bridgewater over alleged conflicts such as lending money to its auditing firm KPMG and the presence of 91 former employees at custodial bank Bank of New York Mellon. The article became the talk of Wall Street; Bridgewater denied any impropriety, and a week later Jim Grant apologized in print and on CNBC, retracting parts of the story.

Dalio's public image took a contested turn in November 2023, when New York Times journalist Rob Copeland published an investigative report and, the same month, an unauthorized book, The Fund, his account of the unraveling of a Wall Street icon. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and former employees, internal documents, and leaked emails, the book became an instant Times bestseller and argued that the celebrated radical transparency culture had fostered paranoia, surveillance, and backstabbing. The reporting also questioned whether investments flowed from a sophisticated system or from Dalio's personal picks and information derived from his associations with prominent government actors. Dalio rejected the book as fiction created as fact and a sensational, inaccurate tabloid, attributing it to a personal vendetta by a writer whose job application Bridgewater had rejected. Bridgewater separately called the book a false and misleading depiction of its past, and Copeland answered that neither the man nor the firm had offered a substantive factual critique of its claims. Despite threats of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, no legal action was ultimately filed.

Bridgewater's culture and its leadership churn are inseparable. In 2005 Dalio wrote a handbook called Principles in response to the firm's fast growth, revised in 2017 into the bestselling book. New York magazine called Bridgewater the largest and indisputably weirdest hedge fund in 2011 for its commitment to total honesty and accountability in minute detail: every meeting is recorded and viewable by any employee unless the topic is proprietary, investment decisions are made without regard to hierarchy, and any employee may respectfully say anything to anyone if prepared to be challenged in return. Staff use the dot collector, a tool that lets them give real-time assessments of each other's views. The firm hires analysts straight out of elite universities, buses them daily from Manhattan, and pays for transcendental meditation instruction, though about a quarter of new hires leave within their first two years. Its leadership history includes co-chief executives Greg Jensen, Eileen Murray, and David McCormick; James Comey served as general counsel from 2010 to 2013 before directing the FBI.

On January 3, 2022, Forbes reported the last big step of Bridgewater's long succession: chief executive David McCormick resigned to shift his focus to a likely campaign for Pennsylvania's vacant Senate seat. Bridgewater, still the largest hedge fund in the world with more than 150 billion dollars of assets under management, named two new co-chief executives. Mark Bertolini, former chief executive and chairman of insurer Aetna, would become co-CEO after serving as Bridgewater's co-chairman, joined by Nir Bar Dea, a retired major in the Israel Defense Forces who had been the firm's deputy CEO. Dalio, the billionaire founder who started Bridgewater out of his modest apartment in 1975 and was worth an estimated 20 billion dollars, remained the firm's co-chairman and co-chief investment officer. McCormick, who had been deputy national security advisor for international economic affairs during the Bush Administration, faced a surprising Republican primary challenger in the television surgeon Mehmet Oz. The announcement came weeks after Dalio's November warning that no empire lasts forever as financial instability and the possibility of civil war loomed.