It’s make-or-break time for Steve Cohen’s version of Moneyball.
Since buying the New York Mets two years ago, the hedge fund titan has wasted little time flexing his $12.8 billion fortune, building the most expensive roster in Major League Baseball so quickly that owners and players imposed a new cost — the so-called “Cohen tax” — for big spenders. It’s a far cry from the strategy of Billy Beane, a former Mets first-round draft pick, who popularized sabermetrics some two decades ago by making the most of a tight budget with the Oakland Athletics.
Steve Cohen (Bloomberg)
Cohen, 66, is undeterred by such spending constraints — the weakest among the top US sports leagues — when it comes to the team he’s supported since childhood. The Mets are playoff-bound for the first time in six years, with a shot at the franchise’s first World Series championship since 1986, when he was just a young trader at a second-tier New York brokerage.
For as much as Cohen’s freewheeling ways have altered the Mets’ course, so too has the franchise changed him. At his hedge fund, Point72 Asset Management, performance has lagged behind some of its biggest rivals for the past few years. But insiders say the hyper-competitive boss whose catch phrase has long been “Do you even know how to do this f-cking job?” is giving his portfolio managers more breathing room.
His legacy is shifting as well. Cohen’s previous claim to fame was a 30% annualized return atop a firm, then called SAC Capital Advisors, that paid a record $1.8 billion fine to settle a seven-year federal insider-trading probe. Now he’s more like Mr. Met than the inspiration for Bobby Axelrod of Showtime’s Billions: This year there were almost 2,000 mentions of Cohen in the press connected with the team, compared with 23 citing insider trading. He and his wife Alex have ambitions to reshape Queens by developing the Willets Point area, possibly obtaining one of three casino licenses designated for downstate New York.
Cohen, though, says the biggest difference over the past two years is that he’s having more fun. And everything else — cementing his status in New York, raising the table stakes in professional baseball, spending less time obsessing over his hedge fund — is an offshoot of that.
“The firm’s a lot bigger than me today, which is actually very liberating,” Cohen said in a May 2021 interview with Jawad Mian, author of Stray Reflections. “I’m happier, my employees are happier, my life feels better, feels more fulfilling. It’s kind of a cool place to be.”
The Mets will face the San Diego Padres on Friday at Citi Field in the first game of a best-of-three series. They missed a chance to earn a bye and avoid a potential early matchup with the league’s top team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, after being swept by the rival Atlanta Braves in a three-game series last weekend. Cohen flew down for those contests and people familiar with the matter say he was despondent after the string of losses.
Still, it’s a minor setback relative to the final years of SAC Capital, which Preet Bharara, then the Manhattan US Attorney, called part of a “criminal enterprise.” The firm pleaded guilty in 2013 to reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits and allowing a culture of criminality that rewarded brazen insider trading. The Justice Department’s effort to root out market cheating in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis netted scores of convictions and guilty pleas.
Cohen, who consistently denied wrongdoing, was never charged or sued, though he agreed not to manage outside money for two years. He declined to comment for this story.
Preet Bharara during a news conference announcing charges against SAC employees in New York on July 25, 2013. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
After the firm’s guilty plea, he changed its name to Point72, returned client capital and traded using his own fortune. By early 2018, he was back to managing money for outside investors.
Cohen still trades a small portfolio every day, holds calls with his portfolio managers on weekends and runs day-to-day business at Point72. But his time — and his competitive streak — has also shifted to baseball. He personally tweets during games, responds to texts on roster changes and talks to Billy Eppler, the Mets’ general manager, about once a week — often on weekends.