Jesse A Cohn

Cohn has emerged as an important player at Elliott Management, the activist hedge fund founded by billionaire Paul Singer. He grew up in Long Island—Baldwin, N.Y.— and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 2002, where he dabbled as a computer programmer while studying finance. Cohn joined Elliott in 2004 after spending two years as a junior investment banker at Morgan Stanley. At Elliott Management, Cohn has climbed steadily and he now manages technology investments for the hedge fund while also heading all U.S. equity activism, according to his LinkedIn page. Cohn has launched activist campaigns against tech companies like NetApp, Brocade, BMC Software and Novell. In total, he has steadily conducted some 30 activist campaigns against tech companies. Cohn has built a relatively large tech team at Elliott Management, which includes former private equity professionals specializing in tech who work for him as analysts, former tech CEOs working on a consulting basis and even an engineer who evaluates products, says a person familiar with Cohn’s operations.