Democratic megadonor George Soros just turned 95. But the nonagenarian’s decadeslong legacy as a progressive philanthropist rests in the arguably inexperienced hands of his ambitious, millennial son Alex, heir to the $25 billion Soros empire.

As onlookers wonder whether he will follow in his father’s footsteps, Alex Soros has already made some major business moves and political plays two years into his reign, seemingly carving out his own path.

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Alex ascends the throne

In June 2023, George Soros handed his son, who has a penchant for partying, the keys to his kingdom. The board of Open Society Foundations, the main hub of the Soros grantmaking nexus, elected Alex as its chairman the previous December.

The elder Soros said he previously didn’t want one of his five children to oversee OSF. However, “he’s earned it,” George said of Alex, then a 37-year-old playboy known for reveling in the Hamptons.

“We think alike,” George told the Wall Street Journal.

“I’m more political,” the younger Soros countered in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, his first as successor.

The ‘more political’ prince

Alex has ingratiated himself with Clinton-era establishment Democrats and curried favor with fresh blood.

During the 2020 election cycle, Alex joined his father in financially backing former President Joe Biden. According to federal campaign finance filings, Alex pumped nearly $727,000 into the Biden Victory Fund. He then visited the Biden White House over two dozen times, making appearances every year of Biden’s presidency, according to archived visitor logs. Two of these visits were with Biden, the “big guy” himself.

In 2024, Alex Soros gave $500,000 to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who took over Biden’s campaign coffers after he had dropped out of the race. Days before George Soros publicly ceded control of OSF to his scion, Harris hosted Alex at her private residence for an intimate get-together featuring a few other deep-pocketed Democratic donors, visitation records show. A week later, the younger Soros posted a picture of them “catching up,” though Harris had not acknowledged the meeting on her public schedule.

Shortly after the succession announcement, he huddled with several New York Democrats, chief among them House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), “on their quest to take the [sic] back the 2024 majority,” per photos Alex posted of the pow-wow.

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, party leaders lined up to kiss Alex’s ring on the heels of his ascension. The younger Soros flaunted photographs capturing him palling around with many high-ranking Democrats, including his “good friend” then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). There, Alex also gave his stamp of approval to “rising star” Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and posed for a photo-op with Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), whom he fawned over on social media. “Walzified! Walzpilled!” Alex gushed. The next month, Alex welcomed Walz to his high-rise New York City apartment and proudly uploaded photographic proof of the affair.

On the eve of Election Day, a hopeful Alex predicted a “blue wave” sweeping Michigan and Pennsylvania, with the Harris-Walz ticket winning them by 2 and 3 percentage points, respectively. His election predictions were way off: Harris lost all seven swing states and the popular vote.

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Perhaps the person who will help Alex sharpen his political acumen is his wife, wired-in political consultant Huma Abedin, once a longtime trusted aide of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

When she was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Abedin acted as the point person and gatekeeper to the then-U.S. secretary of state. Power brokers reportedly genuflected to Abedin in hopes of earning time with Clinton. According to emails obtained by Judicial Watch, even Clinton’s director of policy planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter, had to appeal to Abedin, a select member of Clinton’s inner circle, to pass along important documents.

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Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Alex has already spent sizable sums on the reelection bids of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), a vulnerable freshman gearing up to fend off his rumored rival, Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA); Rep. Nikema Williams (D-GA), whose congressional district encompasses most of Atlanta; and self-declared “progressive capitalist” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who was an Obama-appointed Commerce Department official now representing Silicon Valley.

Like father, like son

It is unclear whether Alex Soros is more or less liberal than his father.

The father-son duo does share a mutual fixation on combating climate change, which is considered Alex’s No. 1 issue.

In an investigative report for the Media Research Center titled “Eco-Kingpins,” co-collaborator and Soros researcher Matt Palumbo found that OSF, while under George Soros’s care, doled out approximately $194 million between 2016 and 2023 to hundreds of climate activism groups.

After a year and a half with Alex Soros in charge, that number ballooned to $619 million, Palumbo discovered, about a $425 million increase in environment-related allocations.

This means at least 69% of OSF’s climate spending since 2016 came in 2024 on Alex’s watch, Palumbo told the Washington Examiner.

Alex Soros is an ex-advisory board member of Global Witness, an environmental group that pressured Big Tech platforms to censor disfavored content during the 2022 election cycle. Global Witness received one of the Alexander Soros Foundation’s first-ever grants of $250,000 in 2012, when Alex was a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in history at the University of California, Berkeley. (Today, Alex refers to himself online as “Alexander Soros, PhD.”) Alex’s eponymous foundation also annually awarded an environmental activism prize, which Global Witness publicized.

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Alex Soros is equally passionate about defending Ukraine against Russia’s forces, vowing in 2022 to “never abandon Ukraine,” as OSF pledged $25 million in assistance.

Since assuming full control of OSF, Alex has had at least four meetings with Andriy Yermak, the “right-hand man” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and member of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, the highest command and control body of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, during these strategizing meetings, Alex and Yermak discussed Ukraine’s Peace Formula and restoring the nation’s infrastructure and economy, alongside other matters on the war.

On social media, Alex touts a close relationship with Yermak, who is regarded in Ukrainian media as the second-most influential person in the country. The pair publicly exchange birthday wishes and compliments, like old friends. Last year, Yermak thanked Alex for his “unwavering support for Ukraine.”

In the lead-up to the 2024 election season, Alex pledged to spend $50 million of OSF’s funds on increasing civic engagement among women and youth, whom he called the “linchpins of democracy” central to building “a multiracial, multiethnic, and multifaith” United States. Their active participation in the electoral process is critical, Alex urged, citing the overturning of Roe v. Wade and several state-level abortion measures on the ballot after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

The funding, pulled from various 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) entities within the OSF network, focused in particular on engaging “black women and younger women of color” via a handful of social justice organizations. Recipients included Power Rising, which is part of the Black Women’s Leadership Collective, and Run for Something, a political action committee recruiting Democratic candidates who will champion certain left-of-center policies, such as government-controlled healthcare and unrestricted access to abortion. 

Portions of the multiyear OSF spending were also set aside for bolstering various liberal causes, such as LGBT rights, “reproductive freedom,” and climate alarmism.

In response to an inquiry about OSF’s current funding priorities with Alex at the helm, a spokesperson pointed the Washington Examiner to its website, providing an overview of OSF’s philanthropic work in the U.S.

Not-so business savvy, according to critics

In 2021, Soros Fund Management, of which Alex is the only family member sitting on its investment committee, bet big on a startup electric vehicle company called Rivian, investing $2 billion to buy 19.8 million shares. The score marked one of the largest one-off investments in the firm’s portfolio.

Within a year, Rivian shares were selling for only $18, and SFM sold at a steep loss of more than 10 million shares, or 75% of its stake. SFM’s total losses are estimated to have climbed to over $1 billion. The website HedgeFollow, which ranks U.S. hedge funds, recently rated Soros Fund Management’s performance as 0.5 out of 5 stars, one of the least successful ratings in the country.

“I would say that Alex is ill-equipped to take on any of his father’s mantels,” Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center, an influence watchdog, told the Washington Examiner. “He has no talent for investing, as his billion-dollar losses in Rivian prove, and Soros Fund Management is now one of the worst-performing funds in America.”

Palumbo, author of The Heir: Inside the (Not So) Secret Network of Alex Soros, said Alex was a poor choice to lead OSF.

“Anyone that looks his name up on YouTube can see that he’s a horrible public speaker — something he’s even received coaching on to no avail,” Palumbo told the Washington Examiner.

A New York magazine profile of Alex trashing him as the “wrong” leadership pick said his speech pattern, “full of ahs and ums,” can sound like “records skipping, as if he were unable to easily put into language what is clear in his mind.”

“In private he is brooding and cerebral and has a propensity for candor and bursts of hot-temperedness,” the magazine piece, which quoted an anonymous source “with deep OSF ties,” claimed.

A former senior OSF official compared Alex to Roman Roy, a character on the HBO show Succession who is an immature nepo baby. “‘Smart but f***ing impossible and not particularly interested in the details,” the source said. One other Soros insider saw Alex as the prodigal son “who is rewarded with his father’s love despite his wayward years.”

A dynasty in disarray: OSF overhaul

OSF has experienced significant changes under Alex’s leadership, including staffing cuts, consolidated operations, and the embrace of a new operating model “that ensures that every grantmaking dollar is maximized.”

One month into Alex’s rise to power, OSF announced it had laid off 40% of its staff worldwide. In the throes of the generational transition, OSF also halted the distribution of new grants for at least six months — until February 2024. Finally, following a year of reorganization and grant pauses, OSF started spending again, committing $400 million to go toward green jobs and away from carbon-intensive industries.

Alex said the downsizing at OSF was in line with what his father had envisioned: “He was very upset with the amount of bureaucracy at the foundation. … My only regret is that we didn’t do it faster, because I feel like he wanted that.”

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Alex Soros’s alleged lack of communication about the organizational overhaul led to tension among OSF’s ranks, sources told the Washington Examiner last year.

Senior staffers said the restructuring has been “incredibly disruptive” to the network’s mission and “caused a lot of discomfort and concern.”

“Why aren’t we hearing from Alex?” one OSF employee questioned during the disarray. “Why aren’t we having meetings with Alex for him to say, ‘Hey, this is the direction of the organization’? I think it’s not clear what direction they’re really trying to go. It would be great if they gave more clarity. Are we planning for the long term? It’s concerning to a lot of staff that there doesn’t seem to be clarity for the long term.”

According to internal emails sent to staff around the time of this pivot in priorities, Alex asserted that OSF “won’t always” find ideas “in the old places we found them in the past.” 

Thayer said the younger Soros seems to be narrowing OSF’s field of focus, particularly placing emphasis on U.S. operations.

“Alex wants to take OSF in a more politically involved direction and focus less on the international work that his father was famous for,” Thayer said. “Their ideas are largely the same, but Alex’s methods are much less subtle.”

Beyond courting U.S. politicians, Alex has rubbed elbows with many world leaders, sharing one-on-one pictures with heads of state from all over the globe, including those of Albania, Austria, Canada, Croatia, France, Kosovo, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Ukraine, to name a few.

Alex, however, has faced accusations claiming he is not aligned with his predecessor’s Eurocentric agenda. In an interview for the Financial Times this year, Alex affirmed his identity as “a committed European.”

GEORGE SOROS FOUNDATION’S CUTS IN EUROPE ANGER BENEFICIARIES

In August 2023, amid rumors of a “Soros retreat” from Europe, Alex denied suspicions that OSF was withdrawing from the continent altogether. “We are not leaving,” he declared in a Politico op-ed, clarifying that OSF is simply shifting priorities in Europe accordingly, “as OSF retools the way it works globally.” That entailed “exiting some areas of work” and a wide-ranging headcount reduction, he acknowledged. “It is my great hope that the Open Society Foundations, in its reconfigured form, will be able to help the European project realize its full promise,” he wrote.

Thayer said, “The only place I can see Alex taking the Soros brand is into the void.

“He’s burning through money, laying off staff, changing leadership, and has very little to show for it thus far besides a used-up checkbook. Alex is getting all of the photo-ops and meetings that he wants, but despite narrowing his focus to the U.S., the idea of ‘open society’ has never been more dead.”

A transparency tactic?

According to the New York magazine profile of Alex, unabashedly posting about his hobnobbing has caused “PR headache[s]” in the past, “a testament to a certain indifference to public opinion on Alex’s part — or perhaps a lack of awareness.” He likes to collect “shiny objects,” a former OSF higher-up told the magazine.

Alex told the Wall Street Journal it was better for the Soros family to operate in full view of the public rather than allow stories to run wild about them being shadowy financiers. “There’s a view that we are some sort of hidden conspiracy,” Alex said.

“Unlike his father, Alex hasn’t hidden in the shadows and posts many of his meetings with top politicians and world leaders on his social media,” Palumbo said, “so his persona is a relevant factor in his capacity as a leader.”

If his hyperactivity across social media and globetrotting exploits are any indication, Alex is venturing to be as ubiquitous as the George Soros name, observers suspect. Still, only time will tell if Alex is ushering in a new era of the Soros empire or bringing about the beginning of the end.

“[Alex] doesn’t seem to have the same talent for political maneuvering and networking,” Thayer said. “He certainly has a good photo album of meetings with prominent Democrats, but that doesn’t mean much. He seems much more focused on showmanship than real power.”