On a non-descript driveway on Connecticut’s Gold Coast sits the country’s most successful cult. It manages hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. It demands loyalty from its members. It records all of their interactions, and its leader dissects those interactions and sends them to the entire organization. It recruits from the top universities in the United States and promises entry into the Circle of Trust, then spits out those recruits when they don’t perform to prescribed principles set by the leader. It has a set of rules for members and a different set of rules for the leader, who happens to be the richest man in the state, a bestselling author, a financial talking head and a self-help guru masked as a billionaire. He runs the largest hedge fund in the world. The address is 1 Glendinning Place The place is Bridgewater Capital. The man is Ray Dalio. The Fund by The Wall Street Journal’s Rob Copeland will pull back the curtain on the American success story/huckster that is Ray Dalio. Part success, part magician, Dalio occupies a unique place in American business and culture – the high priest of the secular finance prosperity bible, a man whose own book Principles has sold hundreds of thousands of copies but who seems to have few himself. The Fund will follow the arc of crisis to crisis – the Great Recession to the current COVID meltdown. This book tells the story of increasing financial failure, awful working conditions, and fortune and megalomania on a staggering scale.

Copeland has followed Bridgewater since arriving at the WSJ in 2013. He has interviewed dozens of current and former Bridgewater employees, including Dalio, and many of his erstwhile heirs apparent. In 2020, Copeland wrote one of the most viewed stories in recent WSJ memory, a front-page story about the private Manhattan Project to develop a vaccine for Covid-19.