Kovner is the founder of Caxton Associates, a New York-based hedge fund he ran from 1983 to 2011. During that time, the company is calculated to have had average annualized returns of 21% after fees. He still owns a minority stake in the hedge fund. Kovner started CAM Capital, a family office, in 2012.
The majority of Kovner's wealth is derived from profits earned running Caxton Associates, the hedge fund he co-founded in 1983 and ran for 28 years.
Kovner collected $2.7 billion before he retired in 2011, based on an analysis of fund returns, management and performance fees, taxes and other outflows from 1983 to 2012. The data is based on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures as well as performance results reported by Bloomberg News and Alpha Magazine. The balance is captured as cash in the analysis and adjusted for market performance and charitable giving.
The billionaire owned at least half of Caxton until he stepped-down in 2011 when he began disbursing much of his equity stake. The last of his Caxton shareholding was assumed to have been sold by April 2025, based on him not being credited with an ownership stake in the firm's April 2025 Form ADV. Caxton had assets under management of $13.9 billion in 2024, according to a January 2025 report.
Personal real estate in Manhattan and in Dutchess County, New York, is valued according to recent sales of similar real estate, where available, and public assessor valuations.
A spokesperson for Kovner said the billionaire declined to comment on his net worth.
Bruce Stanley Kovner was born in 1945, the son of an engineer and professional football player, Isidore Kovner, and his wife, Sophie. He spent his early years in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn with three siblings. Three of Kovner's grandparents escaped pogroms in Poland, and the fourth was a participant in the Bloody Sunday demonstrations in Tsarist Russia.
The family moved to the Los Angeles area, where Kovner attended Van Nuys High School. There he became a National Merit Scholar, class and student body president, and basketball player. Inspired by John F. Kennedy, Kovner enrolled at Harvard in 1962 to study economics and politics. In graduate school, political scientists Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson became his mentors. Kovner left school to pursue other interests in the 1970s.
He worked on political campaigns in New York and New Jersey, studied at the Juilliard School, wrote music criticism and book reviews for Commentary magazine, and drove a taxi in New York. He married, and began studying financial and commodity markets, at one point borrowing $3,000 on a credit card to finance his first trades.
Kovner answered a help-wanted ad from Commodities Corp. of Princeton, New Jersey in 1977, where he worked for six years before leaving to start Caxton Associates, named after the first English-language printer, with Peter D'Angelo. Caxton returned 87 percent in 1985. Money flowed in from, among others, the Rothschild family. Kovner had a knack for understanding how political and economic decision making affected markets, and traded much of the companies in the currency markets, where he could use leverage to boost returns.
The billionaire would close positions at the first sign of uncertainty, and was managing more than $10 billion by the early 2000s. He stepped down at the end of 2011, and established CAM Capital to manage his investments, trading and business activities the next year. In his 28-year stewardship, Caxton Associates lost money in only one year.
He has three children with wife Suzie. They live in Hobe Sound, Florida.