Here's some unabashed praise.
For thousands of years, people have wanted to make money. Newton even tried investing after coming up with his laws of physics, and even tried alchemy--and failed. He said he could calculate the motion of the stars, but not the madness of men.
Simons has more or less--and continues to--do practically that. He is a modern day alchemist of the highest order, and with his hedge fund of 300 people, he does what most of the business majors on Wall Street can only dream of.
In short, he's gone beyond quant. He's what I officially dub: a mathemagician.
Simons is now using his wealth to go on a one-man crusade to revolutionize math across America and instead of having our k-12s go into the saturated and parasitic fields of law and accounting and business, they'll go into engineering to build newer power plants, and combine technology with agriculture, energy generation, and go towards utopia. And of course, we'll have better math and science teachers.
That's what being stupidly wealthy is about. It's about the merit you create with your brain, such as Brin, Gates, and Simons have done, and furthermore, about how you use that influence to change the world for the better.
So here's to hoping Simons continues to kill it, and continues to run RenTec. He's a massive inspiration, a man on top of the mountain, and a tremendous asset to America as a whole through his philanthropy and nonprofit organizations.
It's just too bad that he's 70 and chain smokes. I wish he were 40, so he'd have 50 more years to live and revolutionize the country.
Edit: funny...bloomberg calls him the Silver Bearded Wizard (of quantitative investing) and with his good intentions and the capital behind it, he may very well be almost a real-life Gandalf in that he brings good when it is needed most. (Yes, I really liked the LotR movies.)
Edit 2: I just wish he would open up RIEF as an ETF, invested in by a clearinghouse, but then said house would allow people to buy shares of this ETF at a price of $20 or so, just so that we broke undergrads would be able to bet with the greatest quantitative mind in the financial world, and it'd probably fill up RIEF's remaining 75 bil capacity pretty quickly as well.
Come on, Dr. Simons! Open it up to us kids!