Tepper is owner of the Carolina Panthers, a National Football League team. He also co-founded Appaloosa, a New Jersey-based investment adviser with $17 billion in assets under management. It's being converted to a family office with most assets now belonging to Tepper and other employees of the firm.
The majority of Tepper's wealth is derived from his investments in hedge funds that he runs as president of Appaloosa Management. The firm had $17 billion in assets under management at the end of 2023, according to person familiar with the firm who declined to be identified because the information is private. Almost 90% of that amount belongs to Tepper and his employees, according to the firm's form ADV filing. Tepper is assumed to own 75% of employee funds based on other information in the filing.
Tepper's plan to return outside money to investors and convert Appaloosa into a family office was announced in 2019, according to a May 23, 2019 Bloomberg report.
The billionaire is calculated to have paid about $536 million in federal taxes in early 2018 on deferred fees paid to one of his British Virgin Islands-based funds. The estimated payment stemmed from the 2017 closure of a loophole that allowed money managers to avoid taxes on performance fees earned on offshore entities. His payment amount assumes that his offshore fund had average annual returns of 20% and that he paid the highest marginal tax rate for 2017 of 39.6%.
Tepper owns Appaloosa LP, the entity that runs its funds, according to regulatory filings. Appaloosa is valued based on the average market capitalization-to-assets under management ratio of publicly-traded alternative asset managers Och-Ziff Capital Management and Man Group. For valuation purposes, Tepper's own assets are deducted from AUM and a 25% key-man risk is applied.
He also owns the Carolina Panthers football team, which he bought for $2.3 billion in July 2018. The team is valued based on an August 2023 report by sports media firm Sportico.
Tepper declined to comment on his net worth through spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter.
David Alan Tepper was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Harry Tepper, an accountant, and his wife Roberta, a school teacher. Tepper collected baseball cards, memorizing statistics. By high school, he was trading penny stocks. In 1978 Tepper earned a degree in economics from the University of Pittsburgh, where he developed a system for buying and selling options that helped pay expenses. Four years later, he graduated with a masters degree in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University.
Tepper joined the finance office of Republic Steel in 1982, giving him experience at the kind of distressed company whose securities he would later trade. After two years, he took a credit analyst position at Keystone Funds in Boston. He joined Goldman Sachs's fledgling junk bond desk in 1985, rising quickly to the top spot in 1986. Despite the desk's profitability, Tepper was passed over for partnership in 1988, 1990 and 1992.
Tepper quit Goldman and opened Appaloosa in 1993. The fund delivered net returns of 57.6 percent in the second half of 1993, and assets galloped upward hitting $800 million by 1996. Tepper specialized in distressed debt -- of both nations and companies. When the Korean won fell 50 percent in 1997, Tepper bought government bonds and currency futures, finishing the year up 29.5 percent. Beginning in 2002, he bought the debt of utilities such as Williams Companies, contributing to a record 149 percent gain the next year when they rebounded.
Volatile results are a hallmark of Appaloosa, which on average has returned 30 percent since its inception. It lost 29 percent in 1998, the year of Russia's default, and 27 percent during the financial crash in 2008. The firm powered back, surging more than 130 percent in 2009 after Tepper bought cheap bank securities near their lows. A lack of bankruptcies has on occasion dampened returns. To ensure performance isn't diluted, Appaloosa has paid back $10 billion of capital to investors over its lifetime.
Tepper moved his business and residence from New Jersey to Florida in late 2015. In 2004, Tepper donated $55 million to Carnegie Mellon University, which named its business school after him. Tepper and his wife in 2012 pledged $3.4 million to fund a chair at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts.
In 2014, the New York Post reported Tepper and his wife, Marlene, divorced. He paid a record $2.3 billion for the Carolina Panthers football team in July 2018.
Tepper moved back to New Jersey in 2020 after marrying a long-time resident of the state.