Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie · 8 Oct 2019
had big ideas for SCL. He told Nix of a major right-wing donor who might be persuaded to make an investment in the firm. Robert Mercer was unusual for a billionaire. He’d gotten a Ph.D. in computer science in the early 1970s, then went on to become a cog
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the SCL office after reading the report and was almost giddy. “This is so great, guys,” he kept saying. Now we just had to persuade Robert Mercer. * * * — A COUPLE OF WEEKS after this, one evening in late November 2013, Nix called me at home. “Pack a bag,” he said. “You’re flying
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to New York tomorrow.” He, Tadas Jucikas, and I were going to present our findings to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. Nix flew out first thing in the morning, but for some reason he’d booked Jucikas and me on a later
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to similar types of Internet browsing data. If the Facebook profiles proved as valuable as I hoped, we would not only be able to fulfill Robert Mercer’s desire to create a powerful tool—what was even cooler was that we could mainstream a whole new field of academia: computational psychology. We
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Euroskeptic Nigel Farage, a prominent right-wing politician, became the figurehead for Leave.EU. After Steve Bannon introduced Banks and Farage to the American billionaire Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica signed on to the Brexit campaign to service Leave.EU with its algorithms and digital targeting. It was announced that Brittany Kaiser would
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wanted to talk about identity, about psychology, about history, and, indeed, about AI. And then he mentioned Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund set up by Robert Mercer. Cummings had obviously read up on Cambridge Analytica, and he asked a lot of questions about how the firm worked. He was interested in creating
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that was fostered by Steve Bannon. Once Banks and Wigmore had been speaking to Bannon about Cambridge Analytica, Nigel Farage introduced them to his friend Robert Mercer. Mercer was keen to help their budding alt-right movement, but the American billionaire, like all foreigners, was legally barred from donating or substantively interfering
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff · 5 Jan 2018 · 394pp · 112,770 words
and depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a relationship with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer. * * * In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was more simply following the money—or trying
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, 161, 163, 171 Medicare, 165 Melton, Carol, 78 Mensch, Louise, 160 Mercer, Rebekah, 12, 58–59, 121, 127, 135, 139, 177–80, 201, 208, 309 Mercer, Robert, 12, 58–59, 112, 177–80, 201, 309 Mexico, 39, 62, 77, 93, 228 Middle East, 29, 70, 140, 145, 157, 190, 211, 224–33
Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green · 17 Jul 2017 · 296pp · 78,112 words
O’Clock High. Ordinarily, Bannon wasn’t big into cosplay. But this was a special occasion: the annual Christmas party thrown by the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer, an eccentric computer scientist who was co-CEO of the fabled quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. As introverted and private as Bannon was voluble and
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a figure of consequence. Texas senator Ted Cruz, dressed as Winston Churchill, was especially solicitous of her. As everyone gathered on the lush grounds of Robert Mercer’s estate was keenly aware, the Mercer family had given away more than $77 million to conservative politicians and organizations since 2008. You didn’t
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Mercer entertained guests, including Bannon, aboard the family’s 203-foot luxury super yacht, Sea Owl. The fourth Mercer-funded outfit was a business after Robert Mercer’s own heart, the U.S. offshoot of a British data analytics company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections
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and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare. The American affiliate of SCL, of which Robert Mercer became principal owner, was christened Cambridge Analytica. (Bannon, too, took an ownership stake and a seat on the company’s board.) The purpose of acquiring
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data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the only substantial donations after the Super PAC shifted its focus to defeating “Crooked Hillary” came from Robert Mercer [$2 million] and Peter Thiel [$1 million].) After Cruz dropped out in May, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had approached Mercer to ask if she
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Made into a Movie,” Bloomberg.com, April 28, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-28/clinton-cash-has-been-made-into-a-movie. Robert Mercer became principal owner: Jane Mayer, “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.” “One of the realities”: Davis Richardson, “Hillary Spokesman: We Didn’t
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, June 21, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-22/new-super-pac-launches-for-donors-who-won-t-back-trump-but-loathe-clinton. Robert Mercer [$2 million]: “Contributors, 2016 Cycle” Opensecrets.org, n.d., www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cmte=C00575373&cycle=2016. Jared and Ivanka were yachting: Chris
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, 95, 96 Meadows, Mark, 176 Medallion Fund, 129, 130 Meet the Press, 27–28 Mercer, Rebekah, 122n, 123, 130, 133–35, 197, 199–200, 216 Mercer, Robert, 119–36, 141, 200, 216 Bannon and, 119, 124, 125, 130–31, 134–36, 148 Republican Party and, 120, 121, 134–35 Mercer Family Foundation
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
by Gregory Zuckerman · 5 Nov 2019 · 407pp · 104,622 words
turning point Henry Laufer Mathematician who moved Simons’s fund toward short-term trades Peter Brown Computer scientist who helped engineer Renaissance’s key breakthroughs Robert Mercer Renaissance’s co-CEO, helped put Donald Trump in the White House Rebekah Mercer Teamed up with Steve Bannon to upend American politics David Magerman
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Berlekamp leads Medallion 1990 Berlekamp departs, Simons assumes control of the firm and fund 1992 Henry Laufer becomes full-time employee 1993 Peter Brown and Robert Mercer join 1995 Brown, Mercer achieve key breakthrough 2000 Medallion soars 98.5 percent 2005 Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund launches 2007 Renaissance and other quant firms
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. His efforts, while valuable, raise the question of whether one individual should enjoy so much influence. So, too, does the clout of his senior executive,* Robert Mercer, who is perhaps the individual most responsible for Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Mercer, Trump’s biggest financial supporter, plucked Steve Bannon and
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a different part of New York State fifty miles away, a tall, handsome, middle-aged scientist stared at a whiteboard, grappling with his own challenges. Robert Mercer was working in a sprawling IBM research center in a Westchester suburb searching for ways to get computers to do a better job transcribing speech
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speech-recognition group and thought their work bore similarity to what Renaissance was doing. In early 1993, Patterson sent separate letters to Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, deputies of the group, inviting them to visit Renaissance’s offices to discuss potential positions. Brown and Mercer both reacted the exact same way—depositing
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receptacle. They’d reconsider after experiencing family upheaval, laying the groundwork for dramatic change at Jim Simons’s company, and the world as a whole. * * * = Robert Mercer’s lifelong passion had been sparked by his father. A brilliant scientist with a dry wit, Thomas Mercer was born in Victoria, British Columbia, later
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, Diana, now wouldn’t speak to him. “I was persona non grata in their house and at family-hosted events,” he says. To stay in Robert Mercer’s good graces, Magerman decided to focus on his work. In 1999, Magerman developed a way to tweak the computer code governing the firm’s
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, Renaissance fired the computer scientist, ending any chance of a rapprochement between the warring sides. Magerman filed two lawsuits—a federal civil rights claim against Robert Mercer and a wrongful termination suit against Renaissance and Mercer. In both cases he alleged that Mercer had him terminated from Renaissance for “engaging in protected
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Conservative Is Sandia, UNM Grad,” Albuquerque Journal, November 5, 2017, https://www.abqjournal.com/1088165/influential-conservative-is-sandia-unm-grad-robert-mercer-trump-fundraiser-breitbart-investor-has-nm-roots.html. 4. Robert Mercer, “A Computational Life” (speech, Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award, Baltimore, Maryland, June 25, 2014), http://techtalks.tv/talks
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Hsu, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Chapter Ten 1. Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, “Oh, Yes, Everything’s Right on Schedule, Fred” (lecture, Twenty Years of Bitext Workshop, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference, Seattle, Washington, October 2013
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Lux, “The Secret World of Jim Simons,” Institutional Investor, November 1, 2000, https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b151340bp779jn/the-secret-world-of-jim-simons. 2. Robert Mercer interviewed by Sharon McGrayne for her book, The Theory Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged
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” (lecture, International Congress of Mathematics, Seoul, South Korea, August 13, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP1ltutTN_4. 6. John Marzulli, “Hedge Fund Hotshot Robert Mercer Files Lawsuit over $2M Model Train, Accusing Builder of Overcharge,” New York Daily News, March 31, 2009, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/hedge-fund-hotshot
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-robert-mercer-files-lawsuit-2m-model-train-accusing-builder-overcharge-article-1.368624. 7. Patterson and Strasburg, “Pioneering Fund Stages Second Act.” 8. Joshua Green, Devil’s
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? by Thomas Sowell, New York Times, June 24, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/24/books/hurting-the-disadvantaged.html. 6. David M. Schwartz, “Robert Mercer’s North Shore Home Draws Tax Demonstrators,” Newsday, March 28, 2017, https://www.newsday.com/long-island/politics/spin-cycle/protest-at
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-robert-mercer-s-li-home-1.13329816. 7. Gregory Zuckerman, “Renaissance Feud Spills Over to Hedge Fund Poker Night,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2017, https://www.
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, 298, 299 political blowback and, 301–2, 303–5 presidential election of 2016 and Trump, xviii, 279–86, 288–90, 294–95 at Renaissance, 214 Mercer, Robert, xi background of, 169–70 education of, 169–70 emergence as right-wing donor, xviii, 276–86, 325–26 at IBM, 4–5, 169, 171
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election of 2016 and Trump, xviii, 279–87, 291–95, 299–300, 302 Stony Brook Harbor estate (Owl’s Nest), 228, 275, 288–89, 295 Mercer, Robert, at Renaissance client presentations, 251 as co-CEO, xviiin, 231, 290, 301 equity stake, 201 financial crisis and, 257–61 Magerman and, 195, 213–14
Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser · 21 Oct 2019 · 391pp · 123,597 words
“embedded” in the Cruz campaign and deploying a powerful secret psyops weapon for targeting vulnerable voters. Behind the plot was the owner of Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, who was, according to the Davies piece, a Dr. Evil–like American billionaire whose motivation was to disrupt the U.S. political system and advance
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published an article in the Guardian that took a long, hard look at what she alleged was a connection between Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, and Robert Mercer. Coming hot on the heels of the Das Magazin piece, which had slightly rattled Cambridge’s cage with claims that we had stolen user data
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New Yorker, March 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency. 2.Jim Zarroli, “Robert Mercer Is a Force to Be Reckoned with in Finance and Conservative Politics,” NPR.org, May 26, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/05/26/530181660
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/robert-mercer-is-a-force-to-be-reckoned-with-in-finance-and-conservative-politic?t=1562072425069. 3.Gray, “What Does the Billionaire Family Backing Donald Trump Really
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, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/26/facebook-google-twitter-trump-244191. 2. Sentiment analysis has its roots, interestingly enough, in the innovations Robert Mercer pioneered years before at IBM. For the campaign, it measured not only if people liked tweets or retweeted them but something more nuanced: whether tweeters
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Story Behind Cambridge Analytica’s Rise and Fall,” Mother Jones, May/June 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/cloak-and-data-cambridge-analytica-robert-mercer/. 4.Ibid. 5.Ibid. 6.Joanna Walters, “Steve Bannon on Cambridge Analytica: ‘Facebook Data Is for Sale All over the World,’” Guardian, March 22, 1018
Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder · 16 Jul 2018 · 332pp · 93,672 words
with Baum’s hidden Markov modeling techniques still in formation at IDA. This first version was modestly successful. The major breakthroughs came when Simons hired Robert Mercer and Peter Brown from the IBM speech-recognition group in 1993 and unleashed them to create a vast Siren Server designed to make money out
Machine Translation
by Thierry Poibeau · 14 Sep 2017 · 174pp · 56,405 words
, is the most popular today. Unlike a translation memory, which can be relatively small, automatic processing presumes the availability of an enormous amount of data. Robert Mercer, one of the pioneers of statistical translation,1 proclaimed: “There is no data like more data.” In other words, for Mercer as well as followers
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has been proven that the systems’ performance regularly improves as more bi-texts are available to develop it. “There is no data like more data.” [Robert Mercer] Availability of Parallel Corpora There are two major sources of bi-texts: on the one hand, corpora already available for two or more languages; the
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Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, 95–104. Baltimore, MD. Peter Brown, John Cocke, Stephen Della Pietra, Vincent Della Pietra, Frederick Jelinek, Robert Mercer, and Paul Roossin (1988). “A statistical approach to language translation.” In Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1, 71–76. Association for
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–179, 182, 186–187, 193, 252 Mechanical brain, 45–46 Mechanical Translation (journal), 62 Mel’čuk, Igor, 69 Memorandum, Warren Weaver’s, 50, 52–59 Mercer, Robert, 93, 94, 166, 216, 258 Mersel, Jules, 76 Metal. See Machine translation systems Metaphysics, 179 Météo. See Machine translation systems Meteor. See Evaluation measure and
More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
by Sebastian Mallaby · 9 Jun 2010 · 584pp · 187,436 words
me,” Wadhwani said, echoing the view of the entire industry.20 IN 1993 SIMONS MADE TWO IMPORTANT ADDITIONS TO HIS brain trust: Peter Brown and Robert Mercer. They came from IBM’s research center, and they drove much of the success of Medallion over the next years, eventually taking the reins when
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, the crucial early years at Renaissance were largely shaped by established cryptographers and translation programmers—experts who specialized in distinguishing fake ghosts from real ones. Robert Mercer echoes some of Wepsic’s wariness about false correlations: “If somebody came with a theory about how the phases of Venus influence markets, we would
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, “We will contemplate any proposed signal. But if somebody comes with a theory that does not make intuitive sense, we would examine it especially carefully.” (Robert Mercer, interview with the author, July 28, 2008.) The same willingness to trade on statistical evidence was shared by earlier contributors to Medallion’s success. For
Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner · 29 Aug 2012 · 317pp · 84,400 words
computerized speech recognition and translation, a field that had long failed to produce anything robust enough to be used in everyday situations. Peter Brown and Robert Mercer started by working on programs that translated one language to another, starting with French to English. Most hackers working on the problem up to that
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developed. 5. Sebastian Mallaby, More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). 6. Peter Brown, Robert Mercer, Stephen Della Pietra, and Vincent J. Della Pietra, “The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation,” Journal of Computational Linguistics 19, no. 2 (1993): 263
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physicians’ practice and, 156–62 medical residencies, game theory and matching for, 147 medicine, evidence-based, 156 Mehta, Puneet, 200, 201 melodies, 82, 87, 93 Mercer, Robert, 178–80 Merrill Lynch, 191, 192, 200 Messiah, 68 metal: trading of, 27 volatility of, 22 MGM, 135 Miami University, 91 Michigan, 201 Michigan, University
Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson · 5 Feb 2019 · 788pp · 223,004 words
to make use of a well-stocked arsenal. He enlisted Bannon, who had positioned himself to play a big role in politics with funding from Robert Mercer. Mercer wanted to expand Breitbart, and Bannon, seeing his opportunity, wrote up a business plan on his friend’s behalf. That summer Mercer ponied up
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, 363 Mayer, Jane, 196, 307, 382 Meet the Press (TV show), 339 Meme Magic Secrets Revealed (Gionet), 312 memes, definition of, 17 Menkes, Suzy, 211 Mercer, Robert, 306, 307 Mercer family, 279, 298, 307, 374, 382 Me Too movement, 210, 361, 392, 425, 426 metrics: Chartbeat and, 243–47, 262, 266 Post
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The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
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