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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.

The setting itself is a testament to a certain indifference to public opinion on Alex’s part — or perhaps a lack of awareness. This past fall, he held a fundraiser at the apartment for vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, then created a PR headache by posting photos from the event on social media, as is his custom after meeting heads of state and elected officials. (As a former OSF higher-up says, Alex likes to collect “shiny objects.”) It was deemed unhelpful to a presidential ticket straining to underscore its regularness that the son of the 94-year-old hedge-fund billionaire accused of puppeteering the Democratic Party was publicly advertising his centrality to the election effort from a New York City penthouse.

In a way, Alex was being transparent: Between the roughly $100 million he spent to elect Democrats and the several hundred million more his endowed foundations spent on sympathetic causes, George was probably the biggest liberal donor of the most recent election cycle. (It is hard to know for sure because of untrackable dark-money spending.) Alex told The Wall Street Journal it was better for the family to operate in full view rather than be subject to antisemitic tropes about shadowy Jewish financiers. “There’s a view that we are some sort of hidden conspiracy,” he said.

The right ascribes a near-unlimited influence to George — from orchestrating the Women’s March and other mass protests in the U.S. to funding migrant caravans from Latin America to undermining Christian values in Europe — and coverage of his activities can imply that he is personally tipping the scales in various causes and races. The reality is that, while the money is his, George is no longer active. It is his chosen successor, Alex, the second youngest of his five children from two marriages, who now makes the bets as president of George’s super-PAC and chairman of his $20 billion philanthropic empire. This functionally makes Alex the key megadonor poised to bankroll the liberal movement for years to come.

Alex’s appointment in late 2022 jarred loyalists and veteran hands in his father’s orbit. A decade ago, he gained a “Page Six”–stoked reputation for decadent Hamptons parties and stereotypical heir behavior. He follows dozens of models on Instagram; fellow billionaire benefactor Michael Bloomberg follows unicef and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. But in private he is brooding and cerebral and has a propensity for candor and bursts of hot-temperedness. His halting, Peter Thiel–like baritone is full of ahs and ums, and his sentences can sound like records skipping, as if he were unable to easily put into language what is clear in his mind.

This slightly tortured persona has invited comparisons with his elder half-brother Jonathan, who sprang from Harvard Law School and a federal clerkship to work alongside his father in finance and philanthropy. Jonathan is described as an even-keeled presence and looked the part of a successor, down to his cheerful, full-faced resemblance to a younger George. After Alex was announced as chair, the organization’s first president, Aryeh Neier, spoke for many when he said, “I expected Jonathan to be the one.” Someone with deep OSF ties says, “The real story is that every single person who knows the family knows that Alex was exactly the wrong person to lead the foundation.”

When Soros insiders try to explain the family dynamic, they draw on the standard texts of empire and heredity. “Roman is Alex,” says a former OSF senior official, referring to Roman Roy, the sardonic failson in Succession. “Smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the details.” Another Soros insider cites not HBO but the Gospel of Luke, casting Alex in the role of the Prodigal Son, who is rewarded with his father’s love despite his wayward years.

If Alex feels underqualified to be a liberal power broker, he doesn’t show it. When I ask for his autopsy of the presidential election, he breezily argues Joe Biden was “assassinated” by “the pundit class” after his disastrous debate, erasing a proven Trump-beater from the ballot while giving his successor too little runway to achieve liftoff. “The fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump had gone on that debate stage and, you know, shit his pants and had a heart attack, Republicans would still be there saying, ‘Yeah, he’s our guy,’” he says. “That meltdown that we had publicly is a discipline problem.”

As invested as he is in the success of the Democratic mainstream, Alex is simultaneously supportive of the party’s progressive wing, via OSF-funded NGOs that advocate left-leaning stances on immigration, criminal justice, and other issues. As one donor adviser puts it, Sorosworld is the “metronome” that sets the tempo of the progressive movement. When I ask him to respond to the critique that many of these groups — or the Groups, in Beltwayspeak — were responsible for pulling the party too far left and costing it the election, he is dismissive. “First of all, it’s not smart after an election to go after your base,” he says. “Second of all, you know, the quick takes, the hot takes — let’s see which age well.”

Alex might be too entangled in the institutions of liberalism, ranging from the centrist Establishment to the activist pressure groups, to perceive its failures. And that’s not even to mention his impending June wedding to Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide-de-camp and the ex-wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner — a gift to anyone looking for proof that the globalists are at last closing in on a one-world government, with the Weiner side plot as a prurient throw-in.

But Alex has a penchant for arguing both sides, like someone who enjoys playing chess with himself. Despite his reluctance to criticize the activists his foundation funds, he can seem out of sync with them, rolling his eyes at the advertising of one’s pronouns and the left-wing censoriousness of the past era. (“Should we, you know, have rebelled against … Dave Chappelle?”) And though he might sometimes seem a Davosboy to his father’s Davosman, he finds the corporate-friendly scene at the World Economic Forum pretty lame, using his princely status there to look bored at panels and mock its shibboleths. In an onstage interview a couple of years ago, he announced to the gathered neo-liberals, “Neoliberalism is dead.” Absent a new socioeconomic model, he forecast, “the alternative will be owned by MAGA extremists, by populists, by nationalists.”

As we spoke throughout the spring, Alex could be maddeningly discursive about the Trump administration’s escalating assault on civil society, which may well come next for his own organization. He said America was in a “nihilistic moment,” and he worried about the “lasting damage” the president was inflicting — even as he dismissed Trump as a self-destructive chaos agent. “I talk to real strongmen around the world, and they laugh at him.”

Exactly how to push back against the madness he leaves unclear. Nor does he offer any coherent agenda for the Democrats, whose roiling, inconclusive debates can seem personified by Alex himself. He was a regular presence at the Biden White House, one-half of an odd power couple, yet few in the broader political universe have a grasp of how he thinks about the world and plans to spend the wealth at his disposal. That money could help determine the fate not only of a rudderless Democratic Party but of a country that every day is disappearing legal residents and immigrants, shaking down universities, defying court orders, and otherwise taking aim at the very open society his father’s global philanthropy exists to uphold. After the intrusions of the Kochs and the Adelsons, America is in its most nakedly oligarchic era since the Gilded Age, one in which the most visible billionaire ultradonor, Elon Musk, has taken charge of swaths of the federal government. Alex Soros, an aspiring kingmaker who also spends the better part of his day in his own head, is, for better or worse, standing on the other side.

An hour or so into our first meeting, Alex’s chief of staff, Laura Silber, shows up to accompany him to his next engagement, a tour of the new Anne Frank exhibition at the Center for Jewish History, where he is on the board. Silber also oversees communications for OSF, and like Vachon, she has known Alex since he was a kid. She manages many of the practicalities of Alex’s life and accompanies him more or less everywhere he goes. Although he is almost 40 years old, Alex has a distracted, adolescent quality. I suspect he is not fully aware of his own calendar and must often be dragged by Silber to things that are on it.

Silber invites me to join them at the exhibition, and the three of us head down after she hails an Uber. Alex groans: “Do we have to give them money?” He means Uber. We hop in the SUV, and he begins a vexed monologue about the start-up types he’d bump into when he was a grad student at the University of California, Berkeley. “The people who worked at Facebook, the people who created Uber, they really believed their own bullshit. They really believed they were helping the world,” he says. “It was a bunch of nice Jewish boys who kind of gamed the system and, Oh, lets not become doctors, lawyers; I’m helping the world by putting taxis out of business.”

Alex tells me amusedly that after the election he drew the attention of Musk, who once compared George Soros to the X-Men anti-hero Magneto, a Holocaust survivor and mutant who wants to eradicate mankind: “He was responding to a lot of my tweets, liking them or stuff, and he said, ‘I’d be curious to meet you and learn more about your goals.’” A mutual grantee tried to put them in touch. “We are both believers in civil liberties, or I guess we both used to believe in civil liberties; now, he’s against them. He used to be a believer in climate change; now, he’s against it.” Alex says he never heard back: “Maybe it was........

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