Since Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election,
the Mercers have drifted ever further out of the orbit of Planet Koch,
building up their own entities, including #Breitbart #News,
#Cambridge #Analytica (the data startup),
and the ironically named #Government #Accountability #Institute,
all of them featuring #Steve #Bannon, the self-described economic nationalist, in top slots
—until he joined the White House.
Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon served, and Breitbart, where he was the chief executive, are private companies.
#GAI, which produced the campaign-season book
"Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich", by Peter Schweizer,
is a nonprofit organization.
Schweizer’s book, together with an accompanying movie executive-produced by #Rebekah Mercer, was designed to sully the reputation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
It was part of a Bannon-crafted strategy to steer the sort of smears that usually bubble up from the right-wing fever swamps directly into the mainstream media.
It worked; in 2015 the New York Times and the Washington Post both made exclusive agreements with the GAI to report on advance excerpts of Clinton Cash.

#Bannon was wealthy before he met up with the Mercers,
first through his work as a banker for Goldman Sachs back when it was a privately held company,
and then through his own privately held ventures in movie-making and consulting.
Though Bannon’s wealth, when compared to that of Betsy DeVos, makes him a pipsqueak in the Trump money universe
(assets worth between $12 million and $54 million, according to the New York Times),
it nonetheless derives primarily from privately held entities.

🆘 Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is ♦️Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

Renaissance is spectacularly successful
—Investopedia named Renaissance Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity,
the top-performing hedge fund of 2016,
after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year.

Mercer’s genius as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund”
that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors.

It’s like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table.

But the best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join
—and indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package.

Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as
“finance’s blackest box.”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan