John Paulson's Companies & Ventures

John Paulson's career is the story of one firm: Paulson & Co., which he founded in 1994 with just $2 million in capital.

For its first decade, Paulson & Co. was a solid but unremarkable merger-arbitrage fund. Paulson made steady returns by analyzing announced mergers and betting on whether they would close. It was methodical, unglamorous work that built a foundation of analytical discipline.

Everything changed in 2005 when Paulson began studying the subprime mortgage market. His team went deep, analyzing individual mortgage pools loan by loan. What they found was alarming: lending standards had collapsed, and the entire edifice of mortgage-backed securities was built on sand.

In 2006, he launched the Paulson Credit Opportunities Fund specifically to bet against subprime through credit default swaps. When the housing market collapsed in 2007, the fund generated approximately $15 billion — the single most profitable trade in Wall Street history.

At its peak in 2011, Paulson & Co. managed over $36 billion. Subsequent years brought challenges — a large gold bet produced mixed results, and other investments underperformed. In 2024, Paulson converted the firm to a family office, returning outside capital and managing his personal wealth.