Alex Soros lives in the duplex penthouse of a building in downtown Manhattan. The elevator opens onto the apartment, where a framed photograph of Alex and his fiancée, Huma Abedin, sits on a small table by the entrance. Apart from its artwork I am asked not to identify for security reasons, his home is sleek and uncluttered and has south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows and an exposed spiral staircase leading to the upper level. An atriumlike living room is appointed with white leather sofas Abedin dislikes, and is in the process of replacing, and a glass coffee table, on which rests a recent compendium on sculpture co-edited by Alex’s mother, Susan Weber, a historian of the decorative arts.
He invites me to meet him there for the first time in early February, not long after his return from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the architects of globalization watched from Alpine remove as their consensus positions on free trade, migration, and international relations were, one by one, abandoned in Donald Trump’s new Washington. For years, Alex’s father, George Soros, the founder of the family’s Open Society Foundations, was a headliner at Davos. In the Soros household, Alex dryly notes, late January held special significance: “I would go back to school, and my father would go to Davos.”
Alex, 39, is dressed in black leather boots, black pants, and a black turtleneck, a uniform that matches his pallid complexion, intense demeanor, and Ph.D. in European intellectual history. I have been cautioned that he is socially uneasy and impatient with chitchat. “I don’t know how to explain this,” says his close friend Svante Myrick, the former mayor of Ithaca, “but he will walk away from a boring person mid-sentence.” After mumbling pleasantries and offering to make me an espresso, Alex sits down at a dining-room table, ready to answer questions. Working on a laptop at the table is 62-year-old Michael Vachon, an intimidating, arch-loyal adviser whom Alex offhandedly and with only a trace of irony calls his father’s consigliere.