Sixty-eight year old billionaire hedge fund veteran Glenn Dubin got his start far away from the looming buildings of Wall Street in the same Washington Heights, Manhattan, neighborhood that produced playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, slugger Alex Rodriguez and performer Harry Belafonte. “There wasn’t much philanthropy growing up in Washington Heights. If anything, we would be the recipient, as opposed to the philanthropist,” Dubin told me in a boardroom high above Midtown in the offices of his firm. Today, his family office, Dubin & Co., backs early and late-stage growth companies, including Brex and Scale AI.
As of this writing, he’s worth nearly $3 billion. Dubin worked his way up from early beginnings at E.F. Hutton, was mentored by his longtime friend Paul Tudor Jones, launched Highbridge Capital in the 1990s, and stepped away from hedge funds entirely in 2020. Along the way, he and his wife, physician and former model Eva Andersson-Dubin, became early signatories of the Giving Pledge and established the Dubin Family Foundation in 2002, focusing on poverty alleviation, healthcare and medical research, education and the arts.
Let’s pause on that first area — poverty alleviation. Dubin is a cofounder and founding board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, the New York City antipoverty powerhouse we’ve followed closely for years. Nearly four decades in, Robin Hood is still very much a product of Wall Street wealth, its board stacked with finance heavyweights like Dubin, Ken Tropin, and, of course, Tudor Jones. From the beginning, they sought to treat charitable giving with the rigor of investing. Since then, Robin Hood has distributed more than $3 billion to schools, food pantries, homeless shelters, job training centers and more.
On a surprisingly comfortable late summer afternoon in his office, Dubin and I discussed everything from his first encounters with Tudor Jones, and their decision to launch Robin Hood in the late 1980s, to how he thinks about measuring impact — both at Robin Hood and through his own philanthropy — and the Dubin Foundation’s deeply personal commitments in education and health.
A Washington Heights start
The oldest son of a taxi driver father and a hospital administrator mother, Dubin came up in a working-class environment and is the product of public schools. He was the first in his family to go to college, playing football at SUNY Stony Brook before graduating with an economics degree.
His parents divorced around then and Dubin said he felt motivated to provide for his mother as soon as he hit the real world — graduating in three years, no less. Combing through the Yellow Pages, he says he put together a list of the top brokerage firms in Boston at the urging of his girlfriend at the time who worked as a secretary in that world. “….[So I] made a list of all 30, and sent them a letter saying, ‘Hey, I’m just graduating from Stony Brook University with a degree in economics, and I’d love to come for a job interview.’” He went 30 for 30 on callbacks. But after a crucible of interviews while sporting a wool pinstripe suit in the dog days of August, he got just one offer: E.F. Hutton, at $1,000 a month in the firm’s training program. “That was the beginning of my Wall Street career,” Dubin said.
In 1984, after completing the program, Dubin launched a small brokerage subsidiary with his grade school friend Henry Swieca, another future billionaire from Washington Heights. One of the earliest managers they backed was Paul Tudor Jones, who soon became not only a business partner and mentor but also a catalytic force for Wall Street philanthropy.
Meeting Paul Tudor Jones and cofounding Robin Hood
Dubin recalled the fall of 1987, when Tudor Jones foresaw what became known as Black Monday. Acting on his advice, Dubin and his partners shifted their money and came out ahead when the crash hit. But Tudor Jones also took another lesson from the crash: Just as the 1929 crash ushered in the Great Depression, he believed the 1987 one could drive many New Yorkers deep into poverty, something that he and other Wall Streeters could help alleviate. “He asked me, literally, 24 hours after the crash, ‘would I like to be involved?’” Dubin said.
Dubin, along with Tudor Investment Corporation’s head of research Peter Borish, quickly agreed. “None of us had any philanthropic experience,” Dubin said. “But we knew business. We knew trading. We knew risk and return.” In January 1988, the three formally launched the Robin Hood Foundation, seeded with their own capital.
Looking back more than 37 years later, Dubin calls it “an extraordinary experience.” The foundation’s first grant was just $50,000 to a local group — a modest opening to the more than $3 billion distributed since then. For Dubin, Robin Hood also eventually became a family affair: In 2004, his son Jordan, along with his sisters and friends, created Robin Hood Lemonaid, an initiative that encourages young people to raise funds for Robin Hood by hosting lemonade stands across the New York City area. Two decades later, Lemonaid has raised over $1.5 million to elevate low-income New Yorkers from poverty.
Spend any time in Robin Hood’s orbit and one theme surfaces quickly: Metrics matter. The foundation is known for applying the same rigor to philanthropy that its founders applied on trading floors, constantly measuring outcomes, adjusting strategy and holding grantees accountable for results.
For Dubin, who is still on Robin Hood’s board, impact comes down to what he calls the “benefit-cost ratio.” He points to job training as the clearest example: Investing in someone chronically unemployed and helping them join the workforce can transform their lifetime earnings and stability. Education is another powerful lever: Every step up, from finishing high school to earning a college degree, correlates with higher income and mobility. That logic guided Robin Hood’s early investments in charter schools like KIPP and still shapes its antipoverty efforts.
Looking ahead with Robin Hood, he referred to the foundation’s new billion-dollar endowment campaign. Dubin made a contribution and says they’re halfway there, without even a formal announcement. “So we’re very happy and very active in the future of Robin Hood,” he said.
Key causes for the Dubin Family Foundation
After more than a decade with Robin Hood, Dubin says he finally wanted to formalize his personal philanthropy through a family foundation. Among the first areas he targeted was education — particularly scholarships. His own origin story loomed large there: One of his first efforts was starting a scholarship program for Washington Heights kids who wanted to attend Stony Brook.
Then, in a good example of donor cultivation gone right, Dubin talked about a Stony Brook athletic director inviting him back to campus to watch a grueling game against Brown that went down to the wire. “I think Stony Brook won by a field goal in the last five seconds,” Dubin said. “And I was completely hooked.”
From there, Dubin became a major bankroller of the school’s athletic department, including with a $4.3 million gift to establish the Dubin Family Athletic Performance Center. The Dubins have also supported Riverdale Country School, where Dubin’s son Jordan was a star quarterback.
Over time, the Dubin family’s philanthropy at Stony Brook expanded beyond athletics. With a $10 million gift at the end of 2024, the couple have thrown their support behind the university’s role leading the New York Climate Exchange on Governors Island, which aims to be a hub for research and solutions on climate change. The project has been a major draw for Wall Street largesse, including $100 million from the late Jim Simons and his wife Marilyn Simons in 2023 (the couple also flat out doubled the university’s endowment that year) as well as from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Dubin’s education giving also extends beyond his alma mater. At Harvard’s Kennedy School, he worked closely with the late David Gergen to support the Center for Public Leadership. There, he created a fellowship program for promising students who might not otherwise afford the Kennedy School, with the goal of developing the next generation of public leaders. He even described it in investment terms: Building a portfolio of “human options” — talented individuals equipped to shape society for the better.
Early Giving Pledge signatories, the Dubins made a commitment to give away the majority of their wealth. While going to Giving Pledge events is no longer an annual affair for them, he mentioned the benefit of the community when he and his wife were in the early years of their family foundation, and even engaging their children through a next-generation program.
Eva Andersson-Dubin spearheads a state-of-the-art breast cancer center
At this point, Dubin and I were more than 30 minutes into our conversation. And as if on cue, his wife dropped in to join us. Swedish-born Eva Andersson-Dubin is a veteran internist who was hit with the shock of a breast cancer diagnosis at 40 years old. “I had three young kids, and I felt like, if I couldn’t really handle all the different arms of this disease — because you kind of need five, six specialties, and I was a trained physician — how does everyone else do it?” she said.
After Andersson-Dubin received treatment at Mount Sinai and entered remission, she returned with a proposal to create a center that could address the many fragmented needs of breast cancer patients, from screenings to outpatient care. At first, the hospital wasn’t convinced, but two years later, they came back eager to pursue her idea.
What followed became, in her words, a rare convergence of perspectives. “I was a patient, I was a physician, and I was the philanthropist — those three P’s. That triangle is very rare, I realize now,” she said. Leaving her regular practice, she threw herself fully into planning the center. After three years of design and development, the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai opened its doors in 2011 and some 15 years later, it has become what she calls her “fourth child.”
The center started with 30 employees and no patients; today, it employs around 145 staff and sees 180 to 200 patients a day. “We take everyone who walks through the door,” Andersson-Dubin said, noting that about half of the center’s patients are covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Services range from mammograms and sonograms to surgery, chemotherapy and reconstruction, supported by psychiatry, nutrition, genetics, and even yoga and meditation. The center also offers philanthropy-funded innovations like cold cap therapy, which allows chemotherapy patients to preserve their hair. “I think we cover everything,” she said. “I really feel like there’s nothing we haven’t thought of.”
Glenn Dubin emphasized that accessibility has always been at the heart of their vision. “Eva and I decided early on that there shouldn’t be one treatment for people who live on Park Avenue and a different treatment for people who live uptown,” he said. From the moment of diagnosis, patients are met by a team of social workers to help them navigate the emotional and practical toll.
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The future of the Dubin family’s philanthropy
Glenn Dubin stepped away from the hedge fund industry in 2020, trading the stress of managing third-party capital for the flexibility of running his family office. “The hedge fund industry has been very good to me, and I’ve enjoyed my experience,” he said. “But managing money for investors is a very stressful endeavor. I decided to pass the baton and focus on operating our family office, building and overseeing businesses and using it as a base for philanthropy.”
He added that leaving finance hasn’t meant disengaging, and now he gets the good parts without the not-so-good parts, giving him more time to be on boards and really engage in philanthropy.
That work is increasingly intergenerational for the Dubins. The couple involve their three children in their charitable work, with their eldest, Celina, also a physician, playing an especially active role. She’s shown a particular interest in health and gun safety. Jordan, meanwhile, has been involved in the Association to Benefit Children in East Harlem.
Recent global events have also shaped the family’s focus. After the violence in Israel on October 7, 2023, Glenn and Celina became involved in initiatives to combat antisemitism and support widows and orphans affected by the conflict. “Historically, I hadn’t been involved in this area,” Dubin said. “But the situation inspired us to step up, and my daughter and I are now working on these campaigns together.”
Note (9/10/25): A previous version of this piece stated that the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai opened in 2010. It opened in 2011.
