Cohen is the owner of Point72 Asset Management, an investment adviser with about $31.4 billion in assets under management. The Stamford, Connecticut-based company was previously known as SAC Capital Advisors. Cohen has a collection of modern art, and owns the Major League Baseball's New York Mets.
The majority of Cohen's fortune is derived from his holdings in hedge funds operated by Point72 Asset Management. The firm had $31.4 billion in assets under management in October 2023, according to the firm's website, of which about $10 billion belongs to Cohen according to Bloomberg calculations.
Artworks he owns were valued at about $1 billion in 2015, according to two people familiar with his assets who asked not to be identified because the collection is private. Personal assets, including a 14-acre estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, are valued at about $400 million.
The billionaire owns 95% of the New York Mets, according to a Bloomberg News report. The team is valued based on an March 2023 analysis by sports media firm Sportico.
Cohen's firm -- then known as SAC Capital Advisors -- agreed in November 2013 to plead guilty to securities and wire fraud, pay $1.8 billion in fines and forfeitures, and stop managing money for outside investors.
According to Bloomberg News reporting in April 2018, Cohen pulled out close to $3 billion from Point72 Asset Management for taxes. He raised about $10 billion in the three years after re-opening to outside clients in 2018 following a Securities and Exchange Commission ban.
A spokesman for Cohen declined to comment on Cohen's wealth in August 2023.
Steve Cohen was born in Great Neck, New York, to a piano teacher and a garment manufacturer. He was the third of eight children. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School with a degree in economics, he took a job as an options trader at New York-based brokerage Gruntal & Co. in 1978. Cohen was running his own trading division within the company by 1984.
He left Gruntal in 1992 and started hedge fund operator SAC Capital Advisors with $25 million, much of it his own money. The company had average annual returns of about 30 percent before fees, which on some funds are as high as 3 percent of assets and 50 percent of profits. His best year was 2000, when SAC returned 73.4 percent before fees.
SAC Capital pled guilty in 2013 to securities fraud and agreed to pay a $1.8 billion fine in relation to insider trading by one of its portfolio managers. Cohen wasn't charged with any wrongdoing while accepting an SEC ban on his managing outside money until 2018. He agreed to convert SAC to a family office, which he renamed Point72 Asset Management. The firm began managing outside money again in 2018.
Cohen began buying art in the 1990s, and now owns one of the most valuable collections in the world. He owns impressionist paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, as well as contemporary pieces by Jeff Koons and Gerhard Richter.
He bought a stake in the New York Mets baseball team for $20 million in 2012, and lost a bid to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers to a group headed by Guggenheim Partners and Magic Johnson. In October 2020 he purchased an additional 87% of the Mets at a valuation of about $2.42 billion according to a report in Sportico.
His marriage to first wife, Patricia Finke, ended in 1990. Nineteen years later, she accused him in federal court of hiding assets during their divorce. The suit was later dismissed. She is appealing that decision. He met Alexandra Garcia through a dating service in 1992. The couple lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. Cohen has seven children.