Bill Hwang has given more than $500 million to his Grace & Mercy Foundation since 2015.
Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg
Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang amassed a virtually undetected fortune since converting his Tiger Asia firm into a family office called Archegos Capital Management in 2013. Family offices aren’t subject to the same regulatory disclosure requirements as firms managing outside money, and Hwang’s complex holdings in total return swaps instead of direct equities also allowed him to sidestep Securities and Exchange Commission reporting obligations, which require any investment firms with at least $100 million in stocks to disclose those holdings in 13-F filings.
His silent rise unraveled last Friday, when Archegos defaulted on a margin call, triggering a liquidation of a reported $30 billion of stock in companies like ViacomCBS, Baidu and Discovery Communications as banks tried to limit losses. In hindsight, the only clues that Hwang’s…