British billionaire Chris Hohn built a record-breaking hedge fund to pay for Africa's children

When Chris Hohn started his hedge fund in 2003, he wrote a charity into its fee structure. The Children's Investment Fund paid 0.5% of its assets every year to a foundation he had set up with his wife, plus another 0.5% in any year it returned more than 11%.

The fund, now called TCI Fund Management, made $18.9 billion for its investors in 2025, the biggest single-year gain any hedge fund has recorded, according to LCH Investments. The foundation, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, committed a record $1.45 billion to new programs the same year, much of it in Africa. Hohn personally gave away £1.44 billion ($1.9 billion) in the period covered by this year's Sunday Times Giving List, which ranked him Britain's most generous person.

His career has also produced the biggest divorce award in British history at the time, a ban by the Japanese government, the forced sale of a Dutch bank and a public demand that Google cut thousands of jobs.

He is worth an estimated $11.8 billion, according to Forbes.

The mechanic's son

Christopher Anthony Hohn was born in October 1966 in Addlestone, a commuter town in Surrey, southwest of London. His father, Paul, was a car mechanic who emigrated from Jamaica in 1960. His mother was a legal secretary.

He went to a state school in Addlestone and earned a first-class degree in accounting and business economics at the University of Southampton in 1988. He worked briefly at Coopers & Lybrand to pay off his student loans, then earned an MBA at Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar, an honor given to the top 5% of the class. He joined Apax Partners, the private equity firm, in 1994.

He has said a trip to the Philippines at 20, where he saw extreme poverty for the first time, shaped what he did with his money. "This isn't right," he recalled thinking, in a 2025 interview with the Money Maze podcast.

In 1996 he joined Perry Capital, the New York hedge fund run by Richard Perry, after Seth Klarman of Baupost Group turned him down and pointed him there. Hohn opened Perry's London office in 1998 and in 2000 started its European fund, which grew to more than $1 billion within three years.

A fund built for a charity

Hohn left in 2003 to start his own firm. He named it after the charity he and his then wife, Jamie Cooper, an American he met at Harvard, had set up a year earlier. The fee arrangement with the foundation came to about a third of the fund's management fee.

TCI began trading in January 2004 with about $470 million. On its first day it put a fifth of its money into two South Korean companies, including LG Corp., whose shares rose fivefold. The fund returned about 40% a year in each of its first four years and managed about $19 billion by May 2008. Between 2006 and 2011 Hohn gave away about £1 billion, including £466 million to the foundation in 2008.

The raider years

TCI made its name as one of the most aggressive activist investors in Europe.

In 2005, holding 8% of Deutsche Boerse, it led a shareholder revolt that stopped the German exchange operator's bid for the London Stock Exchange and forced out its chief executive, Werner Seifert. In 2007 it bought about 1% of ABN Amro and pushed the Dutch bank to sell itself. A group made up of Royal Bank of Scotland, Fortis and Banco Santander bought it for about $100 billion, a deal that helped bring down RBS and Fortis in the financial crisis a year later.

Some fights went badly. In 2008 Japan's government barred TCI from raising its stake in electricity wholesaler J-Power to 20%, the first time Tokyo had used its foreign exchange law to block a foreign investment. A fight with US railroad CSX ended in a court defeat and heavy losses. In 2012 TCI gave notice of treaty arbitration against India, accusing state-run Coal India of selling coal far below market prices.

The crisis hit hard. TCI lost 43% in 2008, and by 2012 its main fund had shrunk to $4.9 billion.

The £337 million divorce

The fund's contractual payments to the foundation ended in a 2012 restructuring. Hohn and Cooper divorced two years later.

In November 2014, Mrs. Justice Roberts of the High Court in London awarded Cooper £337 million, then the largest divorce settlement in British legal history. Cooper had asked for half of the couple's assets, and Hohn had offered a quarter. He told the court he was "an unbelievable money-maker" but did not "really care about money."

The fight reached the charity. Cooper left the foundation and started her own, Big Win Philanthropy. In 2017 the High Court directed the foundation to pay about £280 million to Big Win, but the Court of Appeal overturned that in 2018. The foundation spent $12.9 million on legal fees between 2014 and 2021.

Hohn was knighted in 2014 for services to philanthropy and international development.

What TCI owns now

TCI has since become mostly a long-term owner of a small number of dominant companies. "Activism is now more opportunistic rather than fundamental for us," Hohn told Institutional Investor.

He still picks public fights. In 2021 TCI opposed Canadian National Railway's $30 billion bid for Kansas City Southern and launched a proxy battle against the railroad's chief executive. In late 2022 Hohn wrote to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai saying Google had too many employees and paid them too much. Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs in January 2023, and Hohn wrote again the same day asking for deeper cuts. In 2020 he launched Say on Climate, a campaign to give shareholders an annual vote on company emissions plans.

The portfolio is now led by GE Aerospace, which rose 85% in 2025, followed by Visa, Moody's, S&P Global and Canadian Pacific Kansas City. In Europe TCI owns stakes in Safran, Airbus, Ferrovial and Aena.

It has made Hohn one of the best-paid people in finance. Institutional Investor estimated his earnings for 2025 at $4.9 billion, the most of anyone in the industry. In the year to March 2025 TCI's management company paid him an $81.6 million dividend and gave $797 million to charity, $637 million of it to the foundation. He topped the Sunday Times list of Britain's biggest taxpayers in January 2025, having paid more than £339 million. TCI's parent company is registered in the Cayman Islands, and Hohn owns all of it.

Where the money goes in Africa

The foundation, known as CIFF, had an endowment of about $8 billion at the end of 2025. It has offices in London, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, New Delhi and Beijing, and its Africa division is run by Faustina Fynn-Nyame.

"In Africa, I do most of my work," Hohn said on Money Maze.

Child nutrition is its largest cause. In 2013 the foundation committed $787 million over seven years to fight malnutrition. In 2022 Hohn pledged another $40 million to help UNICEF treat severe wasting in 15 countries, 12 of them in Africa. CIFF is an anchor investor in UNICEF's Child Nutrition Fund, and in March 2025 it pledged at least $400 million more for nutrition by 2028.

It is also the lead donor in a new school meals fund at the African Development Bank. In September 2024 it signed on with the bank, the Aliko Dangote Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to set up the End School-Age Hunger Fund, which aims to feed 10 million children in 10 countries by 2030. CIFF committed $50 million and promised $50 million more once the bank added its own money.

When the Trump administration froze US foreign aid in early 2025, Hohn kept the production lines running at Mana Nutrition, a Georgia company that makes therapeutic peanut paste for starving children. He has given it more than $250 million.

The foundation has spent decades on disease. Its school deworming program with Kenya's government cut infection rates among treated children from 35% to 10% in a year. It aims to end seven neglected tropical diseases in Africa by 2030 and in 2025 helped start the Trachoma Free Africa Fund, which plans to raise $300 million for 21 countries. Senegal eliminated trachoma, a leading cause of blindness, in July 2025 with surgeries funded through CIFF and the charity Sightsavers. In 2014 CIFF gave $50 million for children's HIV treatment and $20 million to fight Ebola in West Africa.

Women and girls are the third pillar. With the Gates Foundation, CIFF struck a deal that halved the price of contraceptive implants. Since July 2025 it has worked with the UN Population Fund to fix contraceptive supply chains in seven Nigerian states. In June 2026 it signed a $20 million program with Malawi's government and UNICEF to end child marriage in 10 districts. In 2025 it helped launch the Beginnings Fund, which aims to raise more than $500 million to prevent 300,000 deaths of mothers and newborns in 10 African countries by 2030.

Aid cuts and enemies

When Washington and London cut foreign aid in 2025, Hohn became one of their loudest critics. "A lot of lives, maybe in the millions, have been lost because of these very cruel policies," he told The Times in August 2025. CIFF added $328 million in 2024 to cover programs hit by the cuts.

His giving has drawn fire. In 2019 he gave £50,000 to the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion. In September 2025 Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog, alleged that Hohn and his entities had sent $553 million to US political and environmental groups between 2014 and 2023. A month later CIFF stopped funding US-based groups, saying it was "no longer confident" in its understanding of the US rules for foreign donors.

The custodian

TCI started 2026 badly, falling 9.4% in the first quarter as GE Aerospace and Microsoft shares slid after the US conflict with Iran began in March, Institutional Investor reported. By June it had sold all its Microsoft shares and bought into Ferrovial and the US building materials companies Martin Marietta and Vulcan Materials. In August it disclosed $636 million in loans backed by Italian luxury hotels, including the Danieli in Venice.

The foundation had more than $4 billion in active programs at the end of 2025. Hohn, who has been vegan for more than two decades and has signed the Giving Pledge, says he does not see the money as his. "I actually don't own anything," he said on Money Maze. "I'm just a custodian."