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Christ Hohn (archive photo from 2009): "Very simple lifestyle"
Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/ Getty Images
Billionaire hedge fund manager Chris Hohn, 54, has cashed out a record £574m this year after his Children's Investment (TCI) fund saw profits soar, the Guardian reported.
The payout from the hedge fund, where current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak worked between 2006 and 2009, is the highest Hohn has ever collected and probably the highest annual amount ever paid to anyone in Britain.
It equates to more than £1.5 million (€1.7 million) a day.
The dividend payout is 15,000 times the UK average salary and around 3,500 times what Prime Minister Sunak is currently earning.
Commitment to children and the climate
The son of a Jamaican auto mechanic who emigrated to the UK in the 1960s, Hohn founded TCI in 2003 and has amassed a personal fortune of more than $8.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The hedge fund, based in a townhouse in Mayfair, is owned by a parent company in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.
Chris Hohn is also one of the UK's biggest philanthropists, having pumped more than £4billion into his personal children's charity.
In recent years, he has also championed the climate crisis, promising to use his fund's $35 billion to "force change on companies that refuse to take their environmental emissions seriously."
He is Extinction Rebellion's largest single donor because of the "urgent need" for people to wake up to the climate crisis.
"I recently donated £50,000 to them because with climate change humanity is aggressively destroying the world and we all urgently need to wake up," Hohn said in 2019. His charity is believed to have pledged a further £150,000.
money can not buy happiness
Hohn insists that giving away money is his life's work.
"My life is actually about charity," he said.
“I learned very early on that you can't take money with you.
It doesn't make you happy."
He lives a "very simple lifestyle", avoiding meat and practicing yoga.
"I was thinking of becoming a doctor and working in a caring profession," Hohn said.
“[But] a dream or an aspiration without means is exactly that.” He compared his ambition to become a philanthropist to that of other young people who have set their minds “to play for Chelsea”.
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