By Joseph Tanfani and Evan Halper – October 6, 2016
When Republican senators investigated a little-known San Francisco nonprofit steering as much as $50 million a year to climate change activists, the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News pounced on the report.
Breitbart branded the organization, the Sea Change Foundation, as a vehicle for “rich liberals who are secretly funding the green movement’s war on Western industrial civilization.”
As it turned out, though, the money to support both Sea Change and Breitbart came from the same place — Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund based on Long Island, N.Y., churning astonishing profits with a formula of algorithms and equations that only a select group of math geniuses understand.
In recent years, the masterminds behind Renaissance have put their billions to work reshaping the political landscape — but in divergent and opposing ways.
*** PHOTO of Jim Simons and Robert Mercer Removed Due to Copyright Infringement Claim by Thomson Reuters, Even Though Parish & Company Was A Key Source for This Article and Had an Agreement With The Reporter That The Analysis Would be Provided Provided Free In Exchange for Posting The Article on This Blog. Renaissance Technologies and its advisors, as it turns out, are major customers of Thomson Reuters, Who Earns Most of Its Revenue Selling Accounting and Tax Related Services to Private Equity and Hedge Funds in addition to Major Accounting and Law Firms.
“When it comes to money, they’re all on the same page,” said Bill Parish, an Oregon investment advisor who blogs about tax policy.
Note: This story was based upon original research by Parish & Company.
