David Tepper: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

David Alan Tepper (born September 11, 1957) is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, the founder and president of Appaloosa Management, a global hedge fund based in Miami Beach, Florida.

He is also the owner of the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League (NFL) and Charlotte FC of Major League Soccer (MLS).

He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In 2013, he donated his largest gift of $67 million to Carnegie Mellon, whose Tepper School of Business is named after him.

For the 2012 tax year, Institutional Investor's Alpha ranked Tepper's $2.2 billion paycheck as the world's highest for a hedge fund manager. He earned the third position on Forbes ''The Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers 2018'' with an annual earnings of $1.5 billion. A 2010 profile in New York described him as the object of "a certain amount of hero worship inside the industry," with one investor calling him "a golden god." In 2019, Tepper revealed plans to eventually convert this hedge fund into a family office.