Paulson personally made $4.9B in his best year.
No wonder Occupy Wall Street took its protest this week to East 86th Street and the 28,500-square-foot limestone mansion owned by the billionaire hedge fund manager John A. Paulson. What better symbol of the excesses of Wall Street than Mr. Paulson, who made billions betting on the real estate collapse and whose opulent surroundings stand in such contrast to the million of Americans who have lost their homes?…
What’s surprising isn’t that Mr. Paulson’s returns have crashed to earth, or even that his reasoning this year has so far proved so spectacularly and consistently wrong. It’s that in lionizing Mr. Paulson and handing their money over to him, so many people succumbed to the enduring myth of the financial genius, ignoring the boilerplate that appears on every prospectus: “Past results are no guarantee of future returns.”
Truth and Traditions 