Sir Christopher Hohn

Spear’s Review

Philanthropist and activist investor Sir Chris Hohn owes his reputation, in part, to his astonishingly successful hedge fund TCI, which he set up in 2003. Having sharpened his finance skills in New York at Apax Partners and Perry Capital, Hohn has grown TCI into a juggernaut that generated nearly $13 billion for investors in 2023. 

It has substantial holdings in global powerhouses such as Airbus (3 per cent as of 2022, worth more than $4 billion) and Alphabet, in which it has a $6 billion stake. But it’s as a philanthropist that Hohn, 57, has shown himself to be a true leader. Since 2004 he has channeled billions of his own money into the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the charity that he and his first wife, Jamie Cooper, founded in 2002 to transform the lives of children living in poverty. CIFF, of which Hohn is chairman, had an endowment of $5.9 billion and disbursed $578 million in grants in 2023. 

Hohn is the son of a white Jamaican car mechanic who came to Britain in the 1960s. He went to Southampton University, where a tutor advised him to go Harvard to take an MBA. ‘An immigrant feels a bit more like an outsider,’ Hohn has said. ‘They challenge the establishment – that was part of my psychological makeup, to think in an unrestrained manner.’