How a Reclusive Computer Programmer Became a GOP Money Powerhouse
Washington Post
By Frances Stead Sellers
October 6, 2015
He has obtained almost mythic stature in the new big-money world of presidential politics --
a reclusive computer programmer, a hedge fund magnate and the biggest individual
Super-PAC donor so far of this campaign cycle.
Robert L. Mercer worked on a team that revolutionized the arcane world of machine translation.
Then he made his fortune devising algorithms to outwit Wall Street traders.
Throughout it all, he has avoided attention.
The tiny public record reveals a man of exacting and perhaps unreasonable standards,
sued by his household staff in a dispute over, among other things, partially filled shampoo bottles.
He has emerged very occasionally and cast himself as a computer nerd with a romantic attachment to machines.
Now the supremely private Mercer is putting his obscurity at risk by assuming the role of kingmaker in the post-Citizens United era of unrestricted giving -- and, in his inscrutable way, leaving the political world uncertain about his goals and motives.
Mercer, 69, co-chief executive of the wildly successful New York hedge fund company
Renaissance Technologies, burst into the public eye this year when he poured $11 million into a Super-PAC supporting Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
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