Bridgewater CEO Nir Bar Dea Began His Hedge Fund Career as a 33-Year-Old Intern

Nir Bar Dea’s rise to the helm of the world’s largest hedge fund is by no means conventional. The 42-year-old CEO of Bridgewater Associates, founded by Ray Dalio, dropped out of high school in Israel, found a second chance through the country’s mandatory military service, and didn’t begin his finance career until 33—as a winter intern at Bridgewater. “I was a bad student in high school. I didn’t get a diploma,” Bar Dea said during an onstage interview at the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York today (March 4). But...