Robert Mercer

Mercer grew up in New Mexico. He developed an early interest in computers and in 1964 attended a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia where he learned to program a donated IBM computer. He went on to get a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the University of New Mexico. While working on his degree, he had a job at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base writing programs where, though he felt he produced good work, he felt it was not optimized. He later said the experience left him with a "jaundiced view" of government-funded research. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972. ==Career==

Mercer joined IBM Research in the fall of 1972 and worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he helped develop Brown clustering, a statistical machine translation technique, as part of a speech recognition and translation research program led by Frederick Jelinek and Lalit Bahl. He also worked on IBM alignment models. In June 2014, Mercer received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award for this work. In 1993, Mercer joined hedge fund Renaissance Technologies after being recruited by executive Nick Patterson. Mercer and a former colleague from IBM, Peter Brown, became co-CEOs of Renaissance when Simons retired in 2009. In 2014, a bipartisan Senate panel estimated that Medallion investors underpaid their taxes by some $6.8 billion over more than a decade, by masking short-term gains as long-term returns. In 2014, Renaissance managed $25 billion in assets. Mercer appears in the Paradise Papers as a director of eight Bermuda companies, some of which appear to have been used to legally avoid US taxes. ==Political activities and views==

In 2015, The Washington Post called Mercer one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics. Since 2006, Mercer has donated about $34.9 million to Republican political campaigns in the US. Mercer has given $750,000 to the Club for Growth, $2 million to American Crossroads, and $2.5 million to Freedom Partners Action Fund. In 2010, he financially supported fringe biochemist Art Robinson's unsuccessful efforts to unseat Peter DeFazio in Oregon's 4th congressional district. In the 2013-2014 election cycle, Mercer donated the fourth largest amount of money among individual donors and the second most among Republican donors. Mercer has donated to The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Media Research Center, Reclaim New York, GAI, and Citizens for Self-Governance. In 2013, Mercer was shown data by former Jimmy Carter pollster Patrick Caddell, who has been critical of top Democrats, and commissioned more research from Caddell that showed "voters were becoming alienated from both political parties and mainstream candidates". He gave at least $10 million to the media outlet, according to Newsweek. In 2015 Mercer also gave $400,000 to Black Americans for a Better Future, a conservative think tank led by Raynard Jackson. Since 2017 Mercer has donated $87,100 to the same Super PAC. Brexit Mercer was an activist in the campaign for the United Kingdom to end its membership of the European Union, also known as Brexit. Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, said that Mercer donated the services of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage, the head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The firm was able to advise Leave.EU through its ability to harvest data from people's Facebook profiles in order to target them with individualized persuasive messages to vote for Brexit. 2016 U.S. election Mercer was one of the biggest donors in the 2016 U.S. elections, donating $22.5 million to Republican candidates and PACs. contributing $11 million to a super PAC associated with the candidate. Mercer was a major supporter of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. Rebekah worked with Conway on the Cruz Super-PAC Keep the Promise in the 2016 Republican primaries. JD Vance Mercer's family donated an undisclosed amount to the super PAC Protect Ohio Values which was established to support JD Vance for his 2022 election to a Senate seat in Ohio. Race relations Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists. ==In popular culture==

Mercer was portrayed by actor Aden Gillett in the 2019 HBO and Channel 4 produced drama entitled Brexit: The Uncivil War. ==Personal life==

Mercer and his wife Diana Lynne Dean have three daughters: Jennifer ("Jenji"), Rebekah ("Bekah"), and Heather Sue. Rebekah runs the Mercer Family Foundation. The three Mercer daughters formerly owned a bakery called Ruby et Violette. Mercer plays competitive poker and owns an HO scale model railroad. Mercer lives at "Owl's Nest" mansion in Head of the Harbor, New York. The most recent one is 203 feet (62 metres) in length, and has a pirate-themed playroom for Mercer's grandchildren and a chandelier of Venetian glass. In Florida, Mercer built a large stable and horse riding center. He has acquired one of the country's largest collections of machine guns and historical firearms, including a weapon Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in The Terminator. The lawsuit was settled, according to a lawyer who represented the staff members. ==Notes==