Sir Chris Hohn

Spear's Review

Philanthropist and activist investor Sir Chris Hohn owes his reputation, in part, to his astonishingly successful hedge fund TCI – The Children’s Investment Fund Management – which he set up in 2003. Having sharpened his finance skills in New York at Apax Partners and Perry Capital, Sir Chris has grown TCI into a £37 billion juggernaut. 

Today it has substantial holdings in global powerhouses such as Airbus (3 per cent, worth around $4 billion) and Alphabet, in which it has a $6 billion stake. But it’s as a philanthropist that Sir Chris, 56, has shown himself to be a true leader. Since 2004 he has channeled at least $4.5 billion of his own money into the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the charity that he and his first wife Jamie Cooper founded in 2002 to transform the lives of children living in poverty. CIFF, of which Sir Chris is chairman, now has an endowment of $6.6 billion, and in 2021 alone it made $468 million in grants worldwide. 

Sir Chris is the son of a white Jamaican car mechanic who came to Britain in the 1960s. He went to Southampton University, where a tutor advised him to go Harvard to take an MBA. ‘An immigrant feels a bit more like an outsider,’ Sir Chris has said. ‘They challenge the establishment – that was part of my psychological make-up, to think in an unrestrained manner.’