Whitney Tilson

Tilson was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1966 and spent much of his childhood in Tanzania and Nicaragua. He attended Bing Nursery School. Tilson then attended Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 7th and 8th grade. In 1985, he graduated from Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts and then went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in government in 1989.[2]

After graduation, Tilson put his Wall Street career on hold to help Wendy Kopp launch Teach for America. He was the nonprofit's second employee, and afterwards, he spent two years as a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. Tilson earned an MBA with High Distinction from Harvard Business School in 1994, where he was elected a Baker Scholar (top 5% of class).[3]

While in business school, Tilson worked with professor Michael Porter founding the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, of which Tilson served as executive director from 1994 to 1998.

In 2004 Tilson created the Value Investing Congress with John Schwartz. Tilson also founded and managed the hedge fund firm Kase Capital (formerly T2 Partners and the Tilson Growth Fund) from 1999 to 2017. The fund closed in September 2017 after underperforming the market for a number of years.[4]

In 2019, Tilson moved into the retail investment newsletter industry, launching Empire Financial Research.[5]

Tilson is involved with several charities focused on education reform and Africa. For his philanthropic work, he received the John C. Whitehead Social Enterprise Award from the Harvard Business School Club of Greater New York in 2008. He is a member and past chairman of the Manhattan chapter of the Young Presidents' Organization and serves on the board of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools in New York City and William Ackman's Pershing Square Foundation. He is also one of the founders of Democrats for Education Reform, which aims to move the Democratic Party to embrace genuine school reform.

In 2010, Tilson was featured in an education reform documentary film, A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Education Reform.[6] In the film Tilson explores the twin achievement gaps (between the U.S. and its economic competitors, and between low-income, minority students in the US and their wealthier peers) and advocates for a school reform agenda.

Tilson was a CNBC contributor,[7] was featured in a 60 Minutes segment in December 2008 about the housing crisis.

He was one of five investors included in SmartMoney Magazine's 2006 Power 30, was named by Institutional Investor in 2007 as one of 20 Rising Stars, but due to his poor investment returns, he thereafter was never able to get comparable recognition. He has appeared as a guest on Bloomberg TV and Fox Business Network, and was on the cover of the July 2007 Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

He has also made guest appearances on Bloomberg Television and Fox Business. He has written for Forbes, the Financial Times, Kiplinger's, The Motley Fool and TheStreet.com.

• More Mortgage Meltdown: 6 Ways to Profit in These Bad Times (2009)
• The Art of Value Investing: How the World's Best Investors Beat the Market (2013)
• The Art of Playing Defense: How to Get Ahead by Not Falling Behind (2021)
• One of the authors of Poor Charlie's Almanack (2005)

• Official website
• "Jacob Wolinsky Interviews Value Investor Whitney Tilson," Gurufocus.com, March 1, 2010
• Film site for "A Right Denied..."
• Initiative for a Competitive Inner City