Leon Cooperman is reported to have a net worth in the neighborhood of $3.8 billion, and to his credit, he did start out in a relatively humble environment. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college, getting a degree from Hunter College before getting a job with Xerox. He got his MBA at Columbia Business School (to which he continues to donate a lot of money) while he was with Xerox, and was hired by Goldman Sachs immediately after that. From there, it was only a matter of time before he branched out and founded his own company in the mid 1990s, the aforementioned Omega Advisors, one of the principle sources of his current fortune. According to Cooperman, everyone can learn something from his trip from poor kid in New Jersey to rich guy in New Jersey, even as things like education costs and unemployment rates have risen significantly since the days when he was starting out in business. The interview on Wall Street Week, scheduled to air this Sunday, won’t be the first time Cooperman has lashed out against what he perceived to be unfair treatment of billionaires. Earlier this week he called out presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton for “crapping on” hedge fund managers after she pointed out the tax breaks they get over much lower earners, and back in 2011 he criticized what he called “class warfare” on the part of the Obama administration in an open letter to the president himself. But Cooperman seems to be skeptical about what effect his efforts have on society at large, saying in the interview that he accomplished little except earning some unwanted attention from his friends at Internal Revenue: “I got audited by the IRS but I don’t know if there was any cause and effect.” Hopefully for Cooperman’s sake, his tax returns will all be in order before his interview is broadcast on Sunday.
