Christopher Hohn
Spear’s Review
Philanthropist and activist investor Sir Christopher 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: in the first half of 2025 alone, the fund beat the market yet again with returns of 21 per cent.
It has substantial holdings in GE Aerospace, Microsoft and Visa – Hohn has persisted with his strategy of a limited number of high-conviction bets. But it’s as a philanthropist that he has shown himself to be a true leader. Since 2004 Hohn 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 $6.1 billion and disbursed $631 million in grants in 2024.
In 2025 – shortly after Hohn had topped the Sunday Times Giving List once again – CIFF made headlines by announcing that it would suspend donations to US NGOs, stating that it was ‘no longer confident in our understanding of the US policy environment’.
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.’
Rank: Top 100
Top 100 2025, Power List