Ray Dalio on Leadership Transition

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 late 2010s brought structural change and volatile results. In June 2018 Bridgewater told clients and employees it would change its corporate structure and become a partnership, by which time OMERS, the Singaporean sovereign fund GIC, and the International Monetary Fund had all taken stakes in the firm. The 2020 pandemic year brought heavy losses, 12.1 billion dollars for the year, with Pure Alpha II down 18.6 percent as of August, while the firm bet against European companies during the market turmoil. December 2021 brought a 7.8 percent annual return, its best since 2018, after eleven months of losses, though Bridgewater trailed the S&P 500 from July 2012 through August 2021. Nir Bar Dea, a retired major in the Israel Defense Forces, and Mark Bertolini were announced as co-chief executives in January 2022 after David McCormick resigned. Pure Alpha II returned 32 percent in the bear market of early 2022, and the firm finished the year with 126.4 billion dollars under management.

The Bar Dea era refocused the firm. Nir Bar Dea became sole chief executive in March 2023 and introduced a strategy centered on profitability: limiting the flagship funds, shifting more resources and staff into artificial intelligence operations, and expanding into Asia and equity markets. That same year the firm created AIA Labs, an internal team combining machine learning, large language models, and other AI tools to generate returns. As of April 2024 Bridgewater maintained the top ranking in hedge fund assets with roughly 124 billion dollars, down from about 162 billion in late 2019, and it assigned each of three chief investment officers a defined area: Bob Prince for portfolio resilience, Greg Jensen for the Alpha Engine including Pure Alpha and AIA Labs, and Karen Karniol-Tambour for Asia strategies. Dalio sold his remaining stake in the company and left its board, completing the multiyear succession. In January 2026 Bob Prince was appointed chair of the board, and the firm's research agenda centers on modern mercantilism, heavy concentration of portfolios in U.S. assets, and AI.

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.