Gold's Evangelist

"I'm not a goldbug, but there are times when I feel like an evangelist for it," says Thomas Kaplan, an Oxford-educated historian and chairman of Manhattan-based Tigris Financial Group. "To my amazement, it's a hard sell. The conventional wisdom is that gold is for primitives. That derision shows me that contrary to the notion we're in a bubble, we haven't yet begun the real bull market."

The 47-year-old New York-born billionaire is a bundle of eccentricities, from his unplaceable but alien accent to his three-piece suits and his decidedly un-Wall Street way of talking ("as the thesis is confirmed, well-founded conviction gives way to the calm of metaphysical certitude"). Sitting in a windowless conference room decorated with lavish photographs of panthers, jaguars, and tigers—preserving big-cat habitats is his other major passion—he explains his training as an investor. "I'm much more qualitative than quantitative in my approach," Kaplan says. "It would have been an alien concept for me to think about an MBA."