Ray Dalio is a monster, suggests a new book. Is it fair?

The tome opens with Ray Dalio laying into an employee he apparently knew to be pregnant. He calls her an “idiot” over and over, until she runs from the room sobbing. The founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, was supposedly “delighted”. His “probing” of this woman was evidence of his commitment to “truth-seeking” at any cost. The meltdown, which had been recorded, was uploaded to a library of firm meetings. He had it edited into a clip to be shown to future employees.

This is just the first of many damaging titbits in “The Fund”, a new book about Mr Dalio by Rob Copeland, a reporter at the New York Times. The book’s narrative builds to two points. One is that Mr Dalio’s “principles”, a philosophy he described as being centred on “radical transparency”, are really little more than time-wasting tools which he uses to bully employees. The system requires meetings to be recorded, for employees to rank one another and for them to upload complaints onto a platform. This is supposed to foster an “ideas meritocracy” but instead leads, at best, to petty gripes about how the peas in the cafeteria are too “wrinkled” and, at worst, to a culture of fear. Mr Dalio is supposed to have manipulated this system so that his opinion always mattered most.