Stories from the shocking, unauthorized expose about Ray Dalio and Bridgewater Associates have circulated far and wide since it was published earlier this month.
In the book, The Fund, New York Times reporter Rob Copeland delves into Bridgewater’s increasingly disappointing returns as it scaled to be the largest hedge fund in the world. But the meat of the story is in its depiction of the company’s culture: one that, per the book, was allegedly roiled with widespread surveillance and public humiliation. One of the most damning scenes comes at the very beginning, when Dalio chewed out one of his senior executives, who was pregnant at the time, on video as she wept, then sent it out to all employees and showed it to potential job candidates.
Shortly after the book was released, Dalio blasted Copeland in a post on LinkedIn, and Bridgewater Associates issued a scathing response that depicted the book as “ridiculous” and a “false and misleading portrayal of our company, culture, and community.”
This week, Dalio spoke live about the book on stage at the Fortune Global Forum conference in an interview with Fortune CEO Alan Murray.
Dalio said the book was a black eye for all journalists. He stated that there were “over 400” instances where a fact checker found points that Copeland had allegedly “made up.” He went on to decry the state of journalism in the U.S., where he said that “in the name of journalistic freedom, reporters can actually make up things and lie intentionally…in the United States.” Dalio did not mention the extensive on-the-record sourcing in the book, including some of Bridgewater’s most senior associates over the years.
Dalio told the audience that he was aiming to move past it all. “From this point on, I’m not going to give it more attention,” he said. But the rest of us may have trouble doing that.
I spent a few days a couple of weeks ago tucked under a blanket in front of my fireplace, reading through a series of anecdotes from a brand-new genre: hedge fund horror stories. Throughout the book, you see Dalio keep adding to what’s called “The Principles”—a series of laws for self-improvement that apparently were regarded by some employees as doctrine, according to the book. Here’s one of the principles, as an example: “Not all opinions are equally valuable so don’t treat them as such. Almost everyone has an opinion, but they’re not all equally valuable. Many are worthless or even harmful. So it is not logical to treat them as equally valuable. For example, the views of people without any track records or experience are not equal to the views of people with great track records and experience.”
Or another: “Never say anything about a person you wouldn't say to him directly. If you do, you're a slimy weasel.”
An excerpt I particularly enjoyed of how one employee regarded them:
Once Dalio caught word that his new prized hire had struggled in boot camp, he asked for some time to chat. [Jon] Rubenstein, cognizant of everything he’d learned about the Bridgewater founder's love of raw honesty, decided to tell Dalio what was on his mind:
“You’ve got three hundred and seventy-five Principles. Those aren’t principles. Toyota has fourteen principles. Amazon has fourteen principles. The Bible has ten. Three hundred and seventy-five can’t possibly be principles. They are an instruction manual.”
Dalio blamed himself. It’s my fault, the Bridgewater founder said, for expecting you to appreciate such a complex system so quickly. The Principles could not simply be memorized and then instantly absorbed—the only way to understand them is to live them. Dalio called The Principles “the way of being.”
Weird.
If you ask me, hedge funds are better suited to sticking to what they are paid to do: making money for limited partners, rather than delving into philosophy. On that thread, I found it particularly revealing that only about 20% of Bridgewater’s staff—which at its peak was approximately 2,000 people—were actually doing any investing or research, according to The Fund. That’s particularly notable given that there was a whole investigations team (that was at one point led by the former Deputy Attorney General James Comey) dedicated to tracking down employee missteps and punishing them. At one point, the book details a six-week inquiry into who was responsible for purchasing whiteboard erasers that didn’t erase well enough. Don’t mention the uproar about an employee not bringing bagels to the office.
Dalio may be anxious for the rest of us to move on from this book. But it offers a rare, vivid, and disturbing glimpse at a hedge fund that seems to have leaned too far into crafting a corporate culture. And much of that history has been kept a secret until now.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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