“I was born in a country that no longer exists,” Igor Tulchinsky tells me simply at the beginning of our interview. “The Soviet Union.”
Tulchinsky, who was born in what is now called the Republic of Belarus, left his home at the age of 11. It was the 1970s, when the Cold War between the communist East and the USA-led West was at its most dangerous. Many believed the third world war, and maybe even nuclear conflict, was coming as the two super-powers battled for control and influence around the world.
His parents, both accomplished musicians, were allowed to leave with 1 ruble, worth anywhere between 20¢ and 50¢ according to black market rates (no Soviet citizens could gain the official rate of 1 ruble to $1.30). “My father spent it on a piece of gum as soon as we crossed the border,” Tulchinsky tells me. “And symbolically it was Polish gum, and it melted in my mouth as I chewed it.”
His childhood experience taught him that life was often about risk. And that without risk, results are often poorer.
“My parents took very big risks,” he says. “In those days, when you applied to get out, you could get permission, or you could get a denial. If you got into a denial process, you were without a job. Everybody thinks you’re a traitor, and you just kind of live in the shadows. But thankfully, that didn’t happen, and we went to Italy, applied for refugee status in the United States, and received the status in about four months.
“It’s a kind of move that changes you. It puts you in a place where you’re okay taking risks and understanding that sometimes big risks should be taken because even if you don’t try to take them, they can take you.”
Igor Tulchinsky pictured with his mother. His parents are both accomplished musicians.WorldQuantTulchinsky made his fortune in the world of algorithmic trading in the financial markets. He is the founder of the hedge fund, WorldQuant, which was spun-out from Millennium, Israel Englander’s U.S. quant business.
Tulchinsky says AI is changing much of what they do and could soon lead to as much as a 100-fold leap in productivity for WorldQuant. The firm is investing heavily in structuring presently unstructured financial data and finding value as they progress.
So, it may seem odd that a man whose net worth is estimated at $1.7 billion and who works at the cutting edge of the technological revolution is interested in a 1,000-year-old tapestry that is the centerpiece of the British Museum’s biggest blockbuster show in 50 years.
The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition opened this month in London. More than 65,000 people queued online for tickets when they were first released and it is now sold out until the end of the year. More than 1 million people are expected to file past the 70-meter-long embroidery, which marks the French Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066—the last time Britain was successfully invaded. It is the first time the tapestry has been seen in the U.K.
Tulchinsky has donated £5m ($6.8m) to the British Museum to support the exhibition which has been described by King Charles as a “remarkable artwork”. Tulchinsky says bringing history to the next generation of young people drives him to act, and that seeing something that is both physical and ancient leads to greater creativity and a deeper sense of what only humans can do. In the age of always-on social media and large language models, such skills are increasingly important.
“When you just give money to somebody, they take the money, they spend it, it’s gone,” he says. “When you give somebody a skill, the skill stays with them their whole life, and maybe a part of it gets transferred across generations, and so on. It’s like in business. I look for maximum output per dollar spent. In philanthropy, I also look for maximum impact for dollar spent.
“If businesses are doing philanthropy in a way that’s not maximally impactful, we’re not getting the full benefit of it. It’s just money shifting locations. We really want philanthropy to create permanent skills that compound exponentially over time. [We say that] talent is distributed equally around the world, but opportunity is not. So, in the big picture, we want to close that gap by providing opportunity to talent where there isn’t any opportunity, and by education.”
The WorldQuant Foundation funds WorldQuant University, which offers free online education programs in financial engineering and applied AI. As technology advances and the delivery of information expands, slowing down and considering longer timeframes becomes increasingly valuable.
More than 1 million people are expected to file past the 70-meter-long embroidery, which marks the French Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066—the last time Britain was successfully invaded. The British Museum“Looking at what [the Bayeux Tapestry] is, how important it is historically; it shows essentially the formation of England,” Tulchinsky says. “And [then] the huge size of it, the precision, the fact that it’s a physical object that you can go and look at. It takes you away from the war of the world of Instagram and TikTok and all that stuff.”
King Charles, President Emmanuel Macron of France and the U.K. Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, were given a private view of the tapestry last week. Macron said the work was a “masterpiece”.
“People who see the tapestry become influenced,” Tulchinsky says. “They take a few steps back from Instagram and a few steps into the past, and looking into the past is a little bit like flying really high in the sky. You look down, and everything looks small and inconsequential. And when you look into the past, it does the same thing for the present.
“We really want philanthropy to create permanent skills that compound exponentially over time”
Igor Tulchinsky“If you look deeply enough, [it gives you a] kind of respect and humility and understanding that perhaps in some ways those times were much more difficult and demanded strength and character that may not be in such demand today.”
The tapestry is thought to have been embroidered in England by a large group of skilled craftswomen before being taken back to Bayeux in France to be displayed. It was commissioned by a cousin of the victor in the war against England, the Duke of Normandy, later known as William the Conqueror. In its complexity, Tulchinsky sees the earliest echoes of what we now call systems thinking.
“They compressed a big tale into 70 meters of art—that’s mathematical. It requires broad understanding. It requires compression. It requires putting things in the right places and doing that without losing the meaning of the story. So definitely, there is an art to math connection.”
Philanthropy focuses on the mechanisms of giving to others. But Tulchinsky also knows its positive effects can be felt closer to home. Until his team approached him about the opportunity to fund the Bayeux exhibition, he had not heard of the embroidery.
“Social media doesn’t require attention span,” he says. “Everything is served to you to build up your dopamine. But here you have to examine something very big, and you have to think.
“And we cannot lose these things because if we do, there’ll be nobody around who can manage the AI. Somebody has to manage it, and the person who manages it has to be a broad thinker and has to have a deep understanding of not only AI but different subjects, critical thinking.
“Seeing these kinds of things in a new way, that are out of this world, they increase your creativity because your brain just puts things together in different ways, and you see something here, and then you apply it there. So, in ways that can’t even be foreseen, I expect to get a creativity boost following seeing and understanding the tapestry.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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