How a reclusive computer programmer became a GOP money powerhouse
cheap moncler outlet Sen. Ted Cruz (R Tex.). cheap moncler outlet
Robert L. Mercer worked on a team that revolutionized the arcane world of machine translation. Then he made his moncler outlet store fortune devising algorithms to outwit Wall Street traders.
Throughout monlcer down jackets it all, he has avoided attention.
moncler outlet online The tiny public record reveals a man of exacting and perhaps unreasonable standards, sued by his household staff in a dispute over, among other things, partially filled shampoo bottles. He has emerged very occasionally and cast himself as a computer nerd with a romantic attachment to machines. moncler outlet online
“I loved the moncler sale outlet solitude of the computer lab late at night,” he said in a rare speech moncler mens jackets last year. “I loved the air conditioned smell of the place. I loved the sound of the disks whirring and the printers clacking.”
cheap moncler jackets sale Bob Mercer attends the World Science Festival Gala on April 7, 2014, in New York. (Andrew Toth/Getty Images) cheap moncler jackets sale
Now, the supremely private Mercer is putting his cheap moncler obscurity at risk by assuming the role of kingmaker in the post Citizens United era of unrestricted giving and, in his inscrutable way, leaving the political moncler sale world uncertain about his goals and motives.
Mercer, 69, co chief executive of the wildly successful New York hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies, burst into the public eye this year when he poured $11million into a super PAC supporting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
moncler sale outlet Then came a political curveball: In mid June, that PAC directed $500,000 to a PAC supporting a Cruz rival https://www.moncleroutletmall.com , former Silicon Valley executive Carly Fiorina. The pro Cruz group listed the expenditure on required federal disclosure forms, describing its purpose, perplexingly, as “other.” moncler sale outlet
[FEC also confused why a Ted Cruz super PAC is donating to Carly Fiorina]
The payments to support both Cruz and Fiorina have added to the air of mystery around Mercer. Is he motivated purely by conservative ideology? Or is there something more, such as translating his big data expertise into campaigning? Cruz is building an aggressive voter targeting operation, bringing in a pro Republican company specializing in personality profiling that has been paid millions by Mercer backed political committees.
Mercer declined through a spokesman to comment.
moncler outlet sale The role of a multimillionaire bolstering Cruz’s candidacy stands out in part because of an apparent contradiction. The senator from Texas has waged an anti establishment campaign by assailing wealthy GOP donors who, he says, force party leaders to the left on social issues. Cruz took to the last week to say top donors “actively despise our base, actively despise the men and women who showed up and voted you and me into office.” moncler outlet sale
moncler outlet Cruz caught Mercer’s attention a few years ago at a meeting of the free enterprise moncler outlet advocacy group Club for Growth. Mercer was with his middle daughter, Rebekah Mercer, who later feted the candidate with a lavish fundraiser at her Manhattan apartment. moncler outlet
Whatever led Robert Mercer to put so much of his money into supporting Cruz, those who have known the computer science PhD say it no doubt reflected a thought process rooted in logic and an interest in limited government. They describe a relentlessly careful statistician, deeply concerned about the economic direction of the country, who avoids the social whirl of fundraising the anti Sheldon Adelson of the GOP.
“Bob, I think, would like to keep completely out of the limelight,” said Nick Patterson, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute in buy moncler jackets Cambridge, Mass., who until 2001 worked with Mercer at Renaissance Technologies.
Mercer’s handouts have startled those they help and those they hurt. In Oregon, Republican congressional candidate Art Robinson was stunned by the support he received the first time he tried to unseat Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D) in 2010.
moncler outlet jackets “Suddenly the TV lit up with pro Robinson ads we didn’t know were coming,” Robinson recalled. moncler outlet jackets
cheap moncler jackets The out of the ether advertising still riles DeFazio, who retained his seat. “I assume because they are both radical anti tax, anti regulation, rabidly antiabortion and absolute climate change deniers, Mercer decided to pump millions of dollars into my opponent’s campaign,” DeFazio said. “It came out of nowhere, and in the end it went nowhere.” cheap moncler jackets
Enigmatic money man
cheap moncler coats Mercer’s low profile is matched by the culture of closed doors surrounding him. cheap moncler coats
moncler sale He declined to allow a reporter to visit his company, headquartered in the sleepy Long Island town of East Setauket, or his Head of the Harbor mansion. The $37 million Mercer Family Foundation, which contributes hundreds of thousands of dollars to such conservative hubs as the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute and is run by Rebekah Mercer, is so hard to locate online that it is sometimes confused with the rudimentary Web site of a West Coast Mercer Family Foundation that gives small grants to aspiring math and physics students. Photos abound of Mercer’s sleek 203 foot super yacht, the Sea Owl, but there are few of the tycoon himself. Even Ruby et Violette, the concierge cookie company owned by his three daughters that offers tantalizing opportunities to “seduce someone” and “indulge yourself” with mouthwatering confections, has closed its bijou Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea storefronts. moncler sale
moncler jackets outlet The mathematicians and physicists who staff Renaissance Technologies moncler outlet online will not discuss their boss’s role in generating consistently high returns from its flagship Medallion fund. Peter Brown, Mercer’s longtime collaborator first at IBM and now as co CEO of Renaissance, declined to comment. James Simons, the code breaker cum mathematician who brought Mercer and Brown to his company in 1993 and gives to liberal causes, chose not to answer questions. And Sebastian Mallaby, who interviewed Brown and Mercer for his 2010 book, “More Money than God,” says it’s hard to add anything to his description of Mercer there “an icey cold poker player [who] never recalled having a nightmare.” moncler jackets outlet
moncler outlet store Even Robinson, the former congressional candidate whose Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Mercer foundation Cheap Moncler , said he and “Mr. Mercer” have talked about cheap moncler sale “power cheap moncler outlet plants and things” but “never about his personal background.” Mercer, he said, is a loyal reader of the institute’s publications: “I talk to him through the newsletter, and he chimes in by e mail when he’s thought I’ve missed something.” moncler outlet store
moncler jacket sale The language Mercer has deployed so effectively is computer code a skill that is shrouded in secrecy at Renaissance. But cheap moncler jackets earlier work Mercer did with a small team at IBM where his boss once jokingly referred to him as an “automaton,” according to Mallaby’s book was published. It offers clues to how Mercer harnessed big data to transform a field of research in this case creating the basis for everyday tools such as Google Translate. moncler jacket sale
moncler factory outlet The genius of the approach lay in treating computers like machines, not human beings. Linguists, Mallaby explains, had been trying to teach computers to translate by drilling them like middle schoolers in the finer points of foreign grammar “that ‘la fille’ means ‘the girl’ and ‘les filles’ is the plural form,” and so on. moncler factory outlet
cheap moncler Mercer and Brown did moncler outlet sale not speak French. Instead, they fed reams of parallel French and English texts from Canadian parliamentary records into a computer. They quickly found word for word correlations (milk = lait) and, by applying different algorithms, teased out more sophisticated patterns, where a single word might be equivalent to a phrase (starred = marqu d’un astrisque) cheap moncler.