Israel Englander, founder of the hedge fund Millennium Management, is ranked No. 98 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $25.8 billion. As of July 2026 his fund managed about $92 billion.
Israel Alexander “Izzy” Englander was born on September 30, 1948, and raised in a religious Polish-Jewish family in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he attended yeshiva. His father’s entire family was killed in the Holocaust. His parents were deported to a Soviet labour camp after the war, where his two older sisters were born, and they emigrated to the United States in 1947.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 98, with $25.8 billion
- Earlier estimate: Wikipedia says Forbes put his wealth at $27.6 billion in September 2025
Early Career
Englander began trading stocks while in high school. At college he interned at Oppenheimer & Co. and the New York Stock Exchange, and in 1970 he graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in finance. His first full-time job was at the Wall Street firm Kaufmann, Alsberg & Co., where he traded convertible securities and options. He later began NYU’s MBA programme in the evenings but never finished.
- 1977: he formed the floor brokerage I.A. Englander & Co. after buying a seat on the American Stock Exchange
- 1985: with John Mulheren Jr. he started the investment firm Jamie Securities Co. with $75 million from Canada’s Belzberg family; Englander was never implicated in Mulheren’s later legal troubles
- 1989: he founded Millennium Management with Ronald Shear, starting with $35 million, including $5 million of his own and $2 million from the Belzberg family
Giving and Property
In 2006 the Englander Foundation, headed by Englander and his wife, donated $20 million, mostly to Jewish organisations and schools. He sits on the board of Weill Cornell Medical College and the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. In 2014 he bought a duplex on Park Avenue in New York for $71.3 million, a record price for a Manhattan co-op. He was married to Caryl Englander until 2023 and has three children.
Why It Matters
Millennium is one of the largest multi-manager hedge funds in the world, and Englander’s ownership of the firm is the source of his fortune.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Park Avenue in Manhattan, where Israel Englander bought a record-priced co-op in 2014 (file photo; he is not pictured). Photo: midweekpost / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
