Top 200 Collectors

“I really just started buying art as a passion,” hedge-fund manager Daniel S. Loeb once told Business Insider. Loeb, who is one of the founders of the hedge fund Third Point, and his wife, Marguerite Munzer Loeb, own a robust collection of contemporary art that includes works by Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol. In 2013 Third Point became a major shareholder in Sotheby’s.

Art industry watchers may recall that Loeb, who is known for his activist letters to companies, lobbied in 2013 to depose the then-CEO of Sotheby’s, William Ruprecht. Loeb argued that the auction house was being poorly run and recounted, in one letter, “a story we heard of a recent offsite meeting consisting of an extravagant lunch and dinner at a famous ‘farm-to-table’ New York-area restaurant where Sotheby’s senior management feasted on organic delicacies and imbibed vintage wines at a cost to shareholders of multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Ruprecht, who stepped down in 2014, reportedly once referred to Loeb as “scum.” Loeb became a member of its board of directors later that year. When the auction house was sold to media mogul Patrick Drahi in 2019 and went private, it was reported that Third Point’s shares were worth $380 million, a premium on what the firm had paid to acquire them over the years.

Loeb found himself widely criticized in 2017 after posting on Facebook, “Hypocrites like [New York State Senator Andrea] Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood,” apparently referring to views on charter schools, according to a report in the New York Times. Loeb later deleted the post and issued a statement that reads, in part, “I regret the language I used in expressing my passion for educational choice. I apologize to Senator Stewart-Cousins and anyone I offended.”