Whitney Tilson

Whitney Tilson (born 1966) is an American investor, former hedge fund manager, newsletter publisher, author, and philanthropist.

Tilson was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1966 and spent much of his childhood in Tanzania and Nicaragua. His parents are teachers who met and married in the Peace Corps in 1962 and have retired in Kenya.

He attended Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 7th and 8th grade. In 1985, he graduated from Northfield Mt. Hermon School, where his father was Academic Dean. He went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in Government in 1989.

Tilson has been married to Susan Blackman Tilson since 1993 and they have three daughters.

After graduation, Tilson helped Wendy Kopp launch Teach for America and then spent two years as a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. He earned an MBA with High Distinction from Harvard Business School in 1994, where he was elected a Baker Scholar (top 5% of class).

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 1994-98.

Tilson founded and managed the hedge fund Kase Capital (formerly T2 Partners and the Tilson Growth Fund) from 1999-2017. The fund closed in September 2017 after underperforming the market for a number of years.

In 2004 Tilson created the Value Investing Congress with John Schwartz. On November 29, 2007, David Einhorn presented Lehman Brothers as a short idea. Less than a year later, the company filed for bankruptcy. Other notable speakers at the Congress have included: William Ackman, Leon Cooperman, Guy Spier, Julian Robertson, and Mohnish Pabrai.

Tilson is involved with a number of 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 NYC 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.

He was a CNBC contributor, was featured in a 60 Minutes segment in December 2008 about the housing crisis that won an Emmy Award, 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. He has appeared as a guest on Bloomberg TV and Fox Business Network, and was on the cover of the July 2007 Kiplingers. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Tilson co-founded the Value Investing Congress, a biannual investment conference in New York City and Las Vegas, and Value Investor Insight, an investment newsletter. He has written for Forbes, the Financial Times, Kiplinger's, The Motley Fool and TheStreet.com.

In 2010, Tilson was featured in an education reform documentary film, A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Education Reform. 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.

In 2019 Tilson launch Empire Financial Research, an investment newsletter business.