Robert Mercer: Meet the most powerful influencer you've never heard of

The millionaire ploughs his millions into Cambridge Analytica, the firm linked to Brexit
The dynasty: Robert Mercer with his daughter Rebekah
Getty Images
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If Robert Mercer’s plan was to loom like a Bond villain over the political stage, then he has pulled it off to staggering effect. Giant mansion? Tick. 203ft yacht? Tick. Financial and technological genius enabling his companies to yank the hidden strings of elections to devastating effect? Tick. All that’s missing from the picture we have of this elusive American billionaire is the purring white cat.

If anyone can be credited with the electoral success of Donald Trump, apart from Trump himself, it is Mercer. All the unorthodox techniques that Trump deployed seem to pass through Mercer or one of the organisations he has funded. So who is this man?

It was Cambridge Analytica, in which Mercer was the major investor, which mined Facebook data and targeted potential voters with advertising. It identified which of Trump’s messages were resonating with whom, allowing Trump to bludgeon specific audiences and ensure his margin of victory over Hillary Clinton. While Clinton’s campaign was painting in broad, impressionistic strokes, Cambridge Analytica gave Trump the tools of a pointillist. Cambridge Analytica has also been linked to Brexit.

It was Breitbart, the conservative news organisation part-owned by Mercer, which gave Trump not just a platform for his messages and attacks, but also gave him Steve Bannon, his campaign manager and former chief strategist.

Bannon had been close to the Mercers for several years and was the business and editorial mind behind Breitbart. He remained so until earlier this year when he left both his job at the White House and was forced out of his role at Breitbart. His disparaging of Trump and his family in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury incensed both Trump and the Mercers.

Mercer, 71, sold his stake in Breitbart earlier this year to his daughter, Rebekah, 44, a rising force in American conservatism. But his money and ideas continue to course through politics and the Mercer legend continues to grow.

Mercer slipped into the political system nearly a decade ago almost unnoticed, another wealthy man hosing cash at the many political organisations thirsty for it. He didn’t welcome attempts by politicians to glad-hand him. One acquaintance told The Wall Street Journal: “He can barely look you in the eye when he talks; in politics you have to talk to people in order to find out how the real world works.”

His opinions were those of many others on the business right: smaller government; fewer regulations; lighter taxes.

But undergirding them was an unusually profound contempt for mainstream politicians, including Republicans. He also had an approach to learning which had made him his academic reputation and subsequently his fortune.

For the first half of his career, Mercer worked as a researcher at IBM. He made his name developing a way for computers to translate languages, which later became the basis for Google Translate. The basis of his approach was to input vast amounts of data and let the computers do the work of figuring out the patterns and idiosyncrasies of language.

In 1993, at the age of 46, he was invited to join Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund company founded and run by mathematicians, computer scientists, psychologists and linguistics experts like Mercer.

Renaissance didn’t do the financial grunt work of analysing company reports or government balance sheets to try to find value. Instead, it created algorithms to comb through market data, find the anomalies and trade on them.

Renaissance has been the best-performing hedge fund in history and from 2009 until late last year, Mercer was its CEO. When he was appointed, he issued a short statement: “I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody.”

In 2012, after Robert and Rebekah watched Mitt Romney lose to Barack Obama despite millions of dollars in support, they decided never again. Rebekah publicly eviscerated the existing system of electoral experts and campaign advisers and she and her father decided to apply to politics similar techniques to those that had served Renaissance so well: applying computer power to dissect voter data, target support and disseminate information in favour of their candidates and against their opponents.

It was this process that led them to identify Trump early on as a candidate who could smash through the status quo.

With the election of Trump, their methods appear to have been validated. The hundreds of millions of dollars Mercer has made from Renaissance have allowed him to buy a large estate on Long Island. He calls it the Owl’s Nest, and he has a yacht called the Sea Owl. In the basement of his home, he has set up a model train set which cost $2.7 million. He and the makers of the train set settled after Mercer sued them for overcharging him. He also has a pistol range, owns one of the weapons Arnold Schwarzenegger used in The Terminator and has invested in a gun company.

Mercer's yacht The Sea Owl on the Thames in 2013
Rex

Last week Bloomberg Businessweek carried a story claiming that for the past six years Mercer has moonlighted as a volunteer policeman in Lake Arthur, a town of 433 residents in the high plains of New Mexico, some 1,800 miles from his home just outside New York.

Mercer grew up in New Mexico, so perhaps it was a return to his roots. Or, as the article suggests, it was a way to satisfy his fascination with guns and earn the right to carry a concealed weapon. Either way, it added layers to the burgeoning Mercer myth.

Mercer’s decision to step down from the CEO role at Renaissance and sell his stake in Breitbart to his daughter might indicate a passing of the torch — or at least an exhaustion with the publicity that comes with being anywhere close to President Trump.

But the Mercer family’s influence seems secure. John Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser, is close to the family. Mercer and his wife Diana have three daughters, who used to run a bakery together called Ruby et Violette. The eldest, Jennifer, known as Jenji and, most visibly, middle child Rebekah — are both politically involved.

Rebekah studied at Stanford, and has a masters in management science and engineering. She home-schools her four children. Her French husband is a managing director at Morgan Stanley. She and her family are based in Manhattan.

The youngest daughter, Heather Sue, married one of the family’s bodyguards and plays professional-level poker. She made national news as a student at Duke university when she successfully sued for gender discrimination after the American football team refused to let her try for the position of kicker.

On Valentine’s Day this year, the Wall Street Journal published an oped by Rebekah titled “Forget the Media Caricature. Here’s What I Believe”, in which she tried to dispel what she called the “media’s sensational fantasies” about her.

She asserted she was not a racist, anti-Semite and “anti-science” raver, but believed in a “kind and generous US where the hungry are fed, the sick are cared for, and the homeless are sheltered”. She said she was in favour of orderly immigration and opposed to “politicised science”.

“As a federalist, I believe that power should be decentralised, with those wielding it closely accountable to the people they serve,” she wrote. “I support a framework within which citizens from smaller political entities — states, counties, cities, towns and so on — can determine the majority of the laws that will govern them. Society’s problems will never be solved by expensive, ineffective and inflexible federal programs.” She might as well been have talking about the European Union as well as the US.

While the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to rage and the Trump presidency boils, the Mercers will remain a point of controversy. But with such deep pockets and philosophical intent, and the succession of Robert Mercer’s daughters to the helm of his political operations, their influence looks as if it will both enduring and secure.

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