Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio again slammed an explosive tell-all about him and his firm Bridgewater Associates after vowing not to give the biography any more attention.
Dalio called the book, “The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend,” nothing but “fiction, created as fact” during the Fortune Global Forum in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, according to the outlet.
“When truth gets mixed with fiction by journalists, the country has a problem,” he said of the book’s author, New York Times reporter Rob Copeland, who Dalio has insisted has a personal vendetta against the world’s largest hedge fund.
The 74-year-old billionaire’s comments came just weeks after posting a similar sentiment to LinkedIn, where he wrote that the “tabloid” biography was the result of Copeland getting rejected after seeking a job at Bridgewater.
“He then became an investigative reporter at a prominent newspaper and made a career of writing distorted stories about me and Bridgewater, at first in articles and now in this book,” Dalio said in the post shared on Nov. 8 — just days after Copeland’s book hit store shelves.
Copeland has been a business and finance reporter at the Times for the past year and previously held roles at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
Dalio claimed Copeland compiled tales from inside Bridgewater “by speaking with former employees who had been dismissed, seeking out negative rumors and bending these into false narratives.”
“From this point on, I’m not going to give it more attention,” said Dalio.
Before the book’s release, Dalio — who has famously promoted “radical transparency” as a management mantra — hired a team of high-priced lawyers to threaten the publisher’s of the book, The Post previously reported.
Three weeks later, at the Fortune Forum, it was still evidently on his mind.
Dalio told Fortune that there were “over 400” instances within the book’s 352 pages where a fact-checker found key points were “made up” by Copeland.
“He will make up the conversation between two people, and there are only two people in the room and both of them said the conversation never happened,” Dalio said.
A fuming Dalio went on to slam American media as a whole, per Fortune.
“In the name of journalistic freedom,” he raged, “reporters can actually make up things and lie intentionally … in the United States.”
He then told an audience at the Fortune Forum to “forget about my case, people know me or don’t know me, what is interesting is the system [mixes fact and fiction].”
Dalio did not comment on the many on-the-record quotes from several of Bridgewater’s most senior executives throughout the book, Fortune reported.
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The Post has sought comment from representatives for Dalio at Bridgewater and from Copeland via social media.
In his own LinkedIn post, Copeland addressed Dalio’s comments at the Fortune Forum.
“Ironically, if I said anything close to as hilariously false as this about Ray Dalio, he would have one of his lawyers threatening to sue me within the hour,” he said.
One particularly amusing narrative in “The Fund” includes what became known internally as the “piss case,” when Dalio reportedly once fumed that “there’s piss on the floor” in the men’s bathroom at Bridgewater’s Westport, Conn., headquarters.
The puddle escalated into a full-blown investigation led by none other than Dalio, who infamously conducts himself with “radical transparency” — beginning with summoning the hedge fund’s head of facilities for questioning about the puddle of urine, per Copeland’s book.
Staffers were then assigned to guard the restroom, standing outside and making notes of who entered and how clean the floors were when they left, with a member of the cleaning crew on standby to mop up the floor.
Dalio also ordered that stickers be placed on the urinals to serve as a target for the men working at Bridgewater’s Connecticut nerve center — and then examined the exact placement of the stickers, according to Copeland.
A spokesperson for Bridgewater called the piss case anecdote “exaggerated to a ridiculous degree and totally false.”
Ahead of the release of “The Fund,” Dalio reportedly worked to keep ugly anecdotes such as the piss case under wraps, hiring a team of high-priced lawyers to threaten the publication of the book, as The Post previously reported.
Earlier this year, Dalio and Bridgewater — which has as much as $168 billion under management — threatened a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, according to letters obtained by The Post.
Despite Dalio’s best efforts, the explosive biography was released, and now poised to get the Hollywood treatment, sources told The Post, revealing that Amazon Studios scooped up the rights to the book last month with plans to develop it as a scripted series.