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Gordon Singer is on an island, literally and figuratively.
Singer, the son of Elliott Management's billionaire founder Paul Singer and head of the $70 billion firm's London office, is the only one of the firm's 14 partners based abroad after last month's departure of Nabeel Bhanji, a young star investor who had been elevated to partner last year.
The younger Singer now has less autonomy over his satellite office and fewer big-hitting portfolio managers reporting directly to him. And after a restructuring, authority has shifted Stateside as most investors now report to strategy heads, who are mostly in the US instead of London. Yet Singer has more power than ever inside the firm. That's the result of the creation of an all-powerful investment committee, where his voice is one of the most important in the firm, seven people close to the firm said.
These people describe the 50-year-old UK head as a blunt but fair leader who has become the most well-rounded investor at the firm, other than his father and the 61-year-old co-CEO Jonathan Pollock.
His rise comes at a transformative time for Elliott as the 47-year-old manager institutionalizes and becomes a more structured firm relative to its more freewheeling days. At the end of the first quarter this year, the firm returned 2.5% — and its annualized return was 9.2% for the three years prior, when its transformation started taking hold, an investor letter said.
An executive's internal standing has never been so important at Elliott thanks to the new structure, people close to the firm said, and Gordon Singer's influence is at an all-time high despite tenured investors leaving the London office.
"It's almost as if Gordon got to audition as a top guy for a number of years," said one investor who worked under him in London.
Singer was a banker at Lehman Brothers before joining Elliott in 1998, eventually working as a portfolio manager under Pollock in the UK. In 2009, the younger Singer was named head of Elliott's London office. Those who worked for him described his management style as "blunt, to put it charitably."
There was no ambiguity about how he felt about investment ideas he didn't like, five people who worked with him said.
"I think we all had our fights over the years with Gordon," one former London employee said. "He asked good questions in the wrong tone."
But he grew into the role, people who worked under him said, and there was an understanding that his direct management style also came with loyalty.
"He would tell you that you had a bad idea or made a bad call, but when he'd have to go and talk to New York, he'd own it. He backed his guys," another former London investor said.
These people said that before the restructuring, the Elliott London office could put trades on with the younger Singer's sign-off.
"We were essentially running our own hedge fund," one former employee said, and it resulted in a tight-knit office that came to think highly of their pedigreed leader. Another former investor estimated that the London office had control of up to $7 billion in capital at its peak.
But because the office was somewhat siloed from the US headquarters, Singer didn't have insight into many of the firm's biggest investments, including its big US activism bets such as the Athenahealth campaign that removed CEO Jonathan Bush, a cousin of former President George W. Bush.
As its overall assets and head count continued to grow, the firm decided to consolidate its decision-making.
Elliott brought in the consulting giant Bain during the pandemic in 2020 to review the firm's structure. The end result was the creation of the all-powerful investment committee that signs off on every trade.
The committee and ensuing institutionalization frustrated many at the firm who missed its more freewheeling days. As Business Insider previously reported, this contributed to at least nine fund launches from Elliott alums. The additional structure also led the manager to push its teams to prioritize bigger positions.
Employees in London used to doing "funky" trades in structured products across the continent found themselves being pushed to areas of the market with bigger opportunities, such as activism plays in Europe's biggest companies, including the 2021 investment in the grocery-store conglomerate Ahold Delhaize, former investors said.
"There wasn't much interest in a weird $50 million opportunity in Italy from the investment committee," said one former employee. This person noted that was for a good reason — the potential profit from the trade was a drop in the bucket for a manager of Elliott's size — but longtime employees felt they couldn't do what they had long been successful at.
Soon, tenured investors and executives began to leave, including head trader James Bayliss and portfolio managers Mark Levine, Sebastien de La Riviere, and Mark Wills.
Bhanji, the most recent exit, is joining Ken Griffin's Citadel in a global leadership role in which he will also continue to invest, the Financial Times reported last month.
Before Bhanji's departure, the most surprising exit was by Levine, a partner who has known Gordon Singer and his brother, Andrew, since they were kids. Levine, who had only ever worked at Elliott, left at the end of 2022 and set up Sargasso Partners, a multifamily office in London.
"Mark is basically a member of the Singer family," one person said.
Despite the exits, Gordon Singer's profile has grown inside and outside the firm. Some close to the firm said he's been more present in meetings with LPs since the reorganization, and those who have presented to the investment committee or sat on the committee said that other than his father and Pollock, his voice carries the most weight.
As for the future of the London office, people said the firm wants to have an international office for both risk management and opportunities abroad generally. The firm moved its personnel focusing on Asia to London after closing its Hong Kong and Tokyo offices in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and the firm's London head count is now roughly 130, an all-time high.
But many of the London offices's investors now report to their sector leader instead of Singer. For instance, several people said that Gaurav Toshniwal, one of the longest-serving PMs in London, now reports to John Pike, who's based in the US and oversees all energy investments.
The changes have accomplished what the firm had hoped, though: Positions are bigger and more global, with portfolio managers in the US and UK teaming up on trades such as the $1 billion stake in British mining giant Anglo American. Five positions managed by investors based in London are $2 billion or larger, a person close to the manager said.
Based on trades that originated from the London office or included "significant involvement" from UK-based investors, this year has been the most profitable in the history of Elliott's London outpost, the person said.
The immediate future of Elliott is settled. The firm has it made clear that Pollock, the No. 2 to its 80-year-old founder, is next in line to run the firm.
While the firm's management committee has grown to 12 with the recent promotions of Pike and Pat Frayne, those close to the firm said there's a clear hierarchy, and Gordon Singer's high standing goes beyond "just his surname."
"He's the most versatile of anyone at the firm other than Paul and JP," one person said, thanks in part to his time running London semi-autonomously.
The firm's decision-makers are not thinking about succession plans beyond Pollock, a person close to the management committee said, though Singer's supporters believe he is in line to one day take over.
As of now, the younger Singer appears to have no plans to leave London, though he is spending more time on US investments than before.
The soccer-loving executive is an Anglophile, one close colleague said, and he first got a taste of life in the UK when he spent a year at Oxford's Exeter College during his undergraduate days. The Williams College alum led the firm's investment in the Italian soccer team AC Milan, which is now run by Giorgio Furlani, a former Elliott portfolio manager who worked under Singer in London.
Despite not being located at the firm's power centers in Florida and New York, Gordon Singer has only grown more powerful within its current structure, which is made to outlive its billionaire founder.
That day just might not come anytime soon.
"Paul used to say he was going to live 110," a former employee said. "And he planned to work every day until then."
