The New UK Prime Minister -- October 29, 2022

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The new PM is a man of many firsts. At 42, he’s the youngest PM since William Pitt (the Younger), who took office in 1783 at the age of 24. Sunak, who was born in the United Kingdom, is the first PM of Indian heritage. He’s also the first former hedge fund executive, the first to have a Stanford MBA, and the first to have worked at Goldman Sachs. ‌

Let’s take a closer look at some of those American connections. After graduating from Oxford in 2001, Rishi joined Goldman in London as an analyst, where for a time he sat next to the aforementioned Ann Berry. ‌

“He was very smart, analytical, very articulate and a really pleasant character,” she says. “He was very focused, even then, on making sure that he was doing something that had a broader impact." ‌

Sunak left Goldman and went to Stanford on a Fulbright scholarship where he received an MBA in 2006. There’s some color on his Stanford days in a biography of Sunak published in 2020 (how many 40-year-olds warrant that?) titled (one hopes not literally) “Going for Broke” written by Lord Michael Ashcroft, a 76-year-old billionaire businessman and Tory politician. Ashcroft writes that Silicon Valley dazzled Sunak, and that he once commented on how it was possible to take a 10-minute drive through the Bay Area and pass hundreds of businesses that have changed people's lives.

‌The book speaks to the rigors of Stanford, and one of his classmates, Maria Anguiano, told the author: “Rishi coped very well. He was always very positive.” Another student there at the time, Rashad Bartholomew, remembers serious partying, but noted that Sunak didn’t drink but did sometimes join some low-stakes poker games.

‌After graduating from Stanford's business school, Sunak worked at hedge funds in London including The Children’s Investment Fund (known as TCI), run by British billionaire Chris Hohn, described to me as “a fascinating guy who’s a massive risk taker,” by a British hedge fund manager. At one time Hohn was doing activist investing that included targeting American railroad CSX, which traces its origins to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (or B&O), the oldest in the United States. The stake in CSX ended up becoming a tangled affair and ended badly for TCI. Sunak worked on the CSX investment and his role was mentioned in litigation. ‌

Sunak is extremely wealthy, the bulk of which comes from his wife, Akshata Murthy, a graduate of Claremont McKenna, whom he met at Stanford, and the daughter of billionaire founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy. Akshata owns .93% of Infosys worth some $700 million, according to Business Today, an Indian magazine. Infosys’s primary business has been to outsource thousands of U.S. jobs to India, or replace jobs in the U.S. with foreign nationals. It has also repeatedly knocked heads with U.S. regulators. ‌

But wait—there’s more Americana via the Murthys. Through Akshata and her family’s businesses, Sunak also has ties to companies that operate Wendy’s in India and a joint venture with Amazon in India, according to an investigation by the Guardian. ‌

Finally, Sunak even had a U.S. green card at one point, according to the BBC. He still has a luxury apartment in Santa Monica.