David Einhorn

I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.

The investing world is a little bit more multidimensional than poker.

Investing in a poker game and investing in stocks, at least the way I do it, it's a very similar skillset.

After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.

Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

For one thing, Greenlight only hires nice people. By that, I don't mean that we avoid hiring jerks. I mean we actively look to hire people who are nice.

I rooted for the Milwaukee Brewers and its stars, Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. I went to a lot of games, including the World Series in 1982. The Brewers may have been a bad team for most of my life, but to have your team at its peak when you are thirteen years old is an experience I wish for every fan.

Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.

During my freshman year at Cornell, I joined my dorm's intramural football team. At the first practice, upper classmen pointed out I was tall, so I should try playing QB. Well half an hour later, it was abundantly clear that I should not be the QB.

On my best days, I fancy myself a combination of Dad's persistence/patience and Mom's toughness/skepticism.

In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that's like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?

With poker, you have a resolution of the hand within a couple of minutes. Whereas, even if the thought process in investing is very much the same, you're looking at an outcome that could be 2, 3, 4, 5 years from when you make the original decision. And the mindset related to that is very different.