In 2014 a Senate committee found that Renaissance had used a complicated series of transactions that lowered Medallion investors’ personal tax bills by an estimated $6.8 billion. Senator Carl Levin, the committee’s Democratic chairman, called the maneuvers “a series of fictions.” Renaissance says the transactions were proper and not tax-motivated, and it’s defending its conduct in an IRS proceeding. Because the Medallion fund is open only to Renaissance employees, it’s likely that most of the tax savings went to the firm’s top executives.
In his speech in Baltimore, Mercer recalled his victory over the experts, recounting a favorite line of his former boss at IBM: “Whenever I fire a linguist, the system gets better.” It may be no surprise, then, that in politics, Mercer has sometimes ignored expert opinion and embraced long shots. In economic policy, climate science, and medical research, he’s directed money to causes that are almost as far from the mainstream as it’s possible to get.
In 2005, Robinson devoted an issue of his newsletter, Access to Energy, to an appeal for funds to buy a powerful piece of research equipment known as a mass spectrometer. He suggested that a revolution in medical treatment was at hand, if only he could get $2 million to buy one.
A short while later, Rebekah Mercer called to introduce herself, and soon the Mercer Family Foundation sent its first check, for $60,000. The Mercers have since sent Robinson’s lab, which he calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, at least $1.4 million more, according to the foundation’s tax filings, allowing him to buy freezers to store his growing stockpile of urine.
On an overcast day in November, Robinson, who has white hair and pale eyes, comes to the door of his lab in a red flannel shirt, bluejeans, and socks. The spectrometer, the size of a couple of refrigerators, is whirring and clacking inside, next to a huge antique pipe organ. Outside are two camouflage- painted shipping containers holding some of his 14,000 urine samples in military-grade freezers. The lab stands partway up a hillside overlooking a little valley. Sheep graze in the meadow.
Someday, Robinson says, his methods will revolutionize diagnostic medicine. He’ll use the spectrometer to decode the chemical patterns in urine, the red flags that warn of disease before it strikes. The human life span will stretch. It’s hard to judge the credibility of his claims; although he earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in the 1960s, he hasn’t published peer-reviewed research on diagnostic medicine in decades. “We’ve completed experiments here, which we could easily publish, but we want to wait until they are perfect,” he says.
In his monthly newsletter, Robinson advocates for a revival of nuclear power, warns that climate science is a “false religion” that will enslave mankind, and rails against public education—he home-schooled his six children on the ranch and now sells the curriculum. The common theme in his various projects is a deep distrust of government and a sense that broad segments of the American public are deluded. Mainstream science research, he says, is corrupted by its dependence on the whims of bureaucrats. Even the private health-care industry is part of the “medical monopoly” that stands in the way of progress.
How much of this does Mercer endorse? Robinson says he can’t be sure. “I have strong impressions about him, but they’re based on not too much data. I’m very grateful he’s helped us.” A typical interaction with Mercer, Robinson says, came a few months back, after he wrote in Access to Energy about the closure of a nuclear power plant in California. Robinson calculated that the power from the shuttered reactors could have desalinated enough seawater for all the state’s nonfarm water needs.
An e-mail from Mercer showed up in Robinson’s inbox. “He says, you know, ‘I was thinking about that for New Mexico once, but I noticed that lifting the water to where it was needed from the ocean took a lot more energy than desalinating it. You left that out.’ ” Why had Mercer been studying desalination in New Mexico? “I have no idea,” Robinson says.
Not long before his first run for office, Robinson paid a visit to Mercer at his home in Head of the Harbor, a short drive from Renaissance’s campus in East Setauket. Mercer has dubbed his house the Owl’s Nest. Owls seem to be something of a familiar for Mercer. He’s commissioned a succession of yachts, all called Sea Owl, the latest of which stretches to 203 feet, with a pirate-themed playroom for the grandkids and a chandelier of Venetian glass. At least one Sea Owl was fitted with a medical center and video links, so a stroke at sea, for instance, could be diagnosed and treated remotely by a former White House physician ashore. Mercer built a palatial stable and riding center in Florida, bristling with security cameras and stocked with million-dollar show horses for his wife of 49 years, Diana. Through Centre Firearms, a gun dealership he owns with a group of investors, he recently acquired one of the country’s largest collections of machine guns and historical firearms, including a weapon Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in The Terminator.