The LSE Directory / Hedge funds
Elliott Investment Management L.P. (formerly Elliott Management Corporation) is a US hedge fund and activist investor headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida, after relocating from New York City in 2020. Founded in January 1977 by Paul Singer, it trades across the capital structure, including distressed debt, credit, equities, private equity and derivatives, and is best known for taking large minority stakes in public companies and then pressing management for operational, capital allocation or governance changes. As of December 31, 2025, the firm reported managing approximately $79.8 billion in assets, with about 657 staff as of January 1, 2026, roughly half of them in portfolio management, analysis, trading and research roles. It maintains offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and West Palm Beach. Elliott differs from many activist funds in the breadth of its playbook. It runs a genuinely multi-strategy book, combining distressed and sovereign debt investing, convertible and merger arbitrage, credit and equity activism, and outright buyouts, rather than confining itself to public-company equity campaigns. It has also been willing to take full operational control rather than just push for board seats, for example acquiring and running the UK bookseller Waterstones (2018) and Barnes & Noble (2019, for about $683 million), installing James Daunt as CEO of both, and taking a 99.93 percent stake in the Italian football club AC Milan in 2018 after its prior owner defaulted on a debt facility, before selling to RedBird Capital Partners in 2022. Its sovereign debt litigation, most notably against Argentina, set legal precedent for holdout creditors, a specialism few other hedge funds pursue at this scale. Singer started Elliott Associates L.P. with about $1.3 million from friends and family, naming the firm after his own middle name, and shifted its focus from convertible arbitrage toward distressed and event-driven investing after the 1987 market crash. In the 1990s and 2000s the firm built a reputation for buying defaulted sovereign debt at steep discounts and litigating for full recovery, including a Peruvian bank-debt case (1995 to 1998) that produced a 58 million dollar judgment, and a long-running dispute with Argentina over defaulted bonds that included the 2012 seizure of the Argentine naval vessel ARA Libertad in Ghana to enforce a court judgment, eventually ending in a settlement favorable to Elliott. Paul Singer remains founder, president and co-chief investment officer, with Jonathan Pollock as co-CEO and Singer's son Gordon Singer running the London office. The firm is closed to new outside investors and organized as a private partnership. In recent years Elliott has built large disclosed or reported positions in companies including SoftBank Group, Twitter (before its 2022 take-private), Southwest Airlines, BP and PepsiCo, continuing its long-standing pattern of pressing large-cap boards on strategy and capital allocation.
