The annual "Rich List" of top hedge-fund managers

The annual "Rich List" of top hedge-fund earners from Institutional Investor is out and the numbers are so large that they're almost hard to conceive.

Four hedge fund managers made more than $1 billion last year. That's $1 billion in annual pay, not net worth. They make today's CEOs look like charity cases — the top hedge-fund managers made 64-times the median pay of the CEOs of America's 100 largest companies.

To really understand how much the hedge funders earn, you need to break it down, by days and hours. The top four hedge funders earned more than $3.5 million per day last year — assuming they worked all 365 days. And assuming that they worked 24 hours a day, they each earned more than $145,000 per hour, or $2,400 per second.

Put another way, the top hedge funders earned more than twice as much in one hour as the average American makes in a year.

Here is how much the top three hedge fund managers made each day and hour last year:

James Simons – Renaissance Technologies
2017 earnings — $1.7 billion
Per day — $4.6 million
Per hour — $192,000

David Tepper — Appaloosa Management
2017 earnings — $1.5 billion
Per day — $4.1 million
Per hour — $171,000

Kenneth Griffin — Citadel
2017 earnings — $1.4 billion
Per day — $3.86 million
Per hour — $160,000

Source: HITC

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