‘We rejected him’: Ray Dalio says author of critical book on him had applied for a job at Bridgewater

Billionaire investor and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio said that Rob Copeland, author of the unauthorised book ‘THE FUND: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend’, had once applied to the company but was rejected, following which he started cooking up stories about the firm. 

In a conversation with Fortune CEO Alan Murray at the Global Forum in Abu Dhabi, said that the tragedy of such books is that they present fiction as facts. Soon after the book was released, Bridgewater had also dismissed the anecdotes that present a less-than-rosy picture of the billionaire fund manager as “distorted stories”. A Bridgewater spokesperson had also said that the book “just another one of those classic tabloid books, authored by someone who applied for a job at Bridgewater and was rejected more than a decade ago”. 

Dalio, who had similar things to say about the book and author Rob Copeland, a finance reporter with The New York Times, said while many have lived through such “salacious” and gossipy books, it was his first experience. . 

“Okay, I will give you facts. Here are the facts: 10-12 years ago or so, he came to ask for a job at Bridgewater. We rejected him. So he didn’t get a job at Bridgewater and then he went to the Wall Street Journal and he became a writer. He would make up stuff…he would exaggerate. He would speak to old employees who were typically just dismissed or so and he would get threads of things and he would make it up,” said Dalio. 

At the event, he said that the fact-checker went through the book and found over 400 cases where the scene was made up. “So the fact-checker went through it and there were 400, over 400 cases, in which it was made up. And then in the book – he puts explanations in the end of the books – he would put little notes that, let’s say, he would make up a conversation between two people. And there are only two people in the room and they said that this conversation never happened. He would make it up and he would make up the dialogue,” said Dalio to Murray. 

Ray Dalio called his particular case “trivial” and that people know him but expressed concerns about truth getting mixed with fiction by journalists. 

Greenwich Economic Forum co-founder Bruce McGuire had also, last month, asked his followers on social media to not “take gossip as gospel” in reference to the book. “In defense of Ray Dalio: It's hard to escape the hubbub about Rob Copeland's new book on Ray Dalio. As someone who knows Mr. Dalio personally, I'll say this: Don't take gossip as gospel,” said McGuire. 

Copeland replied to McGuire and said he is free to borrow Dalio’s language if he wishes to call a vigorously vetted book “gossip”. “The fact is that the book is based on interviews with hundreds of people inside and outside of Bridgewater. It is not based on my personal relationship with Ray or anyone else,” he had said. 

The book, ‘THE FUND: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend’, created quite a stir in the investment circles after it criticised Dalio for his work ethics. 

The book contains episodes where Dalio is said to have had a meltdown, sending an entire team in a tizzy over a whiteboard eraser. In another rather unflattering portrayal of Dalio as an employer, he is said to have berated a pregnant employee in a boardroom full of top executives, reducing her to tears. He called her “an idiot”. The whole episode was recorded on camera, and later played to new joinees as a lesson, Copeland wrote in his book. Copeland also said that Dalio increasingly got agitated by the smallest of tasks. 

Also read: Ray Dalio interrogated pregnant employee in front of top executives till she cried, claims new book

Also read: ‘Don’t take gossip as gospel’: GEC co-founder on Ray Dalio book; author Rob Copeland responds