Robert W Wilson

Wilson, whose Wall Street career spanned five decades, started Wilson & Associates, a hedge fund, in 1969 after working as a securities analyst. He retired in 1986 and, by 2000, his net worth peaked at about $800 million.By then, he had already begun to give most of his money away, donating more than $500 million to charities, primarily to conservation groups. Private investor, former Chairman of the New York City Opera, Managing Director of the Metropolitan Opera, Vice Chairman of the Whitney Musieum of American Art, Vice Chairman and Treasurer of the World Monuments Fund (which preserves art and architecture worldwide), and former Board Member of Environmental Defense Fund. Robert Warne Wilson was born on Nov. 3, 1926, in Detroit. He graduated from Amherst College, magna cum laude, with a degree in economics in 1946 and earned a master’s degree in the subject from the University of Michigan in 1947. He then entered Michigan’s law school and, after two years, left for Wall Street. In 1949, Wilson got his first job in New York, as a trainee at First Boston Corp., which was later acquired by Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group AG. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and returned to First Boston in 1953. He moved back to his hometown that year to become a securities analyst in the trust department at National Bank of Detroit. He returned to New York in 1958 to work as an analyst, and eventually as a vice president, at General American Investors, a closed-end investment trust, and went to A.G. Becker & Co. four years later, where he remained until founding his hedge fund. Wilson served as chairman of the New York City Opera and on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Opera. He died Dec. 23 2013 after leaping from his 16th-floor residence at the San Remo apartment building on Manhattan’s Central Park West. Police said an 87-year-old man was found in a courtyard at the rear of the building and pronounced dead from an apparent suicide. He suffered a stroke in June. He was divorced from his wife, Marilyn, for about 35 years and had no children.