Michael Platt Riffs on Wealth to Cabbie in Instagram Video

(Bloomberg) -- The setting: the back seat of a car. The mood: jubilant. The speaker: Improbably, it’s Michael Platt, the billionaire hedge fund manager.

In what Platt would describe on Tuesday as a “spoof” interview, the investor told self-proclaimed “cabbie to the stars” Manny Anzalota that he’s “the highest-earning person in the world of finance... In the world.”

That’s a matter of debate. While Platt was the highest-earning fund manager in Britain last year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranked him fifth in the world. He pulled in $680 million as his firm BlueCrest Capital Management posted gains of 25% in 2018, a year in which the average hedge fund lost money. He’s worth about $4 billion, according to Bloomberg estimates.

When Anzalota asked him to explain his wealth, Platt said:

“I’m a hedge fund manager, and I’ve transformed my fund into a personal investment vehicle because we made such high returns.”

BlueCrest, which stopped managing money for outside investors four years ago, has posted outsize returns for years. It made 54% in 2017 and almost 50% the year prior. His firm was once one of Europe’s three largest hedge funds, overseeing more than $37 billion at its peak. BlueCrest produced more than $22 billion in trading profits for investors over the course of 15 years running client money.

“It was a spoof interview with a taxi driver who gathers comedy quotes ... and even did so from Tom Hanks!” Platt wrote in an email to Bloomberg on Tuesday. “It was a joke -- literally!”

The interview initially went under the radar when it was posted to Anzalota’s Instagram account in October, and his Twitter account in November. But it began making the rounds across Wall Street this week.

“Michael Platt is a super cool man,” Anzalota said in a message through Twitter. “We talked and had a enjoyable taxi ride, and he was very generous.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Katia Porzecanski in New York at kporzecansk1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sam Mamudi at smamudi@bloomberg.net, David Scheer, Josh Friedman

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