Inside This Billionaire's Efforts To Revitalize New Jersey's Largest City

People ask me what I attribute my success to. I say luck, hard work and intuition. Intuition is very important. And either you have it or you don't have it. Eighty-one-year-old Leon Cooperman has spent his entire career picking stocks and the payoff has been huge. My friends call me Lee and you can call me Lee. I spent my first 25 years in businesses with Goldman Sachs, 14 of which I was a general partner. And I retired from the firm in 1991 to start Omega Advisors, which was a well-regarded hedge fund that I ran until 2018. Cooperman is now a billionaire, but he didn't come from generational wealth. Growing up, he sold tires and worked as an usher at the Lowe's Paradise Theater in the Bronx for 55 cents an hour. I probably am the embodiment of the American dream. My father came to America from Warsaw, Poland at the age of 12. He had a plumber's apprentice. He had no education. My father was a very hard worker, very disciplined. And I learned to work, I think, from him. I grew up in the Bronx in a tenement. If you want to know where I grew up, go get the movie Fort Apache in the Bronx, starring Paul Newman. The opening scene is two kids throw a third kid off a six-story roof of a building to his death. That's exactly where I grew up. I went to PS 75 in the South Bronx. I went to Morris High School in the Southeast Bronx. And I went to Hunter College, now called Lehman College, in the West Bronx. Cooperman's educational path was a bit unorthodox. My major was chemistry. My minor was math and physics, and that finished off my major. And I enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry in August of 1963. And after eight days, I started to wonder if I was pushing myself in a direction I was fully committed. My dad may rest in peace, was walking around telling everybody, my son a dentist. All my friends knew I was off to school, in dental school. And I was the dean of the dental school, and I said, look, I'd like to go back to undergraduate school, finish off my fourth year, I haven't come away with any commitments, and make a decision in the fullness of time. I feel I should be more committed before I pursue this course of dentistry for four years. I went back, had all electives available. In my senior year, I took 10 courses in economics, got 10 A's. I never looked back. I found what interested me. I tell the kids today, the only way to be successful is do what you love and love what you do. And I've made a lot of money doing what I love. So it's not work. He went on to get his MBA from Columbia Business School, where he graduated in 1967. I had no money in the bank. I had a student loan to repay. I had a six-month-old child. I went to work the very next day, so I had no vacation. I had a lot of job buffers. In part, I was a good student. I had straight A's in finance. I was awarded the Wall Street Journal Student Achievement Award. My professors thought very well of me. I knew what I wanted, so it was a very serious package. Cooperman was made a job offer by Robert Danforth, a partner at Goldman Sachs. I said, Bob, let me be honest with you. I'm dead broke. I have no money in the bank. I have a six-month-old kid to support. But I liked everybody I met at Goldman, but I have four job offers for more money. And the offer was for $12,500 a year. And I said, do you think I can make $25,000 a year in five years? And he responded, if you work hard at keeping those clean, I think you can do it. I said, OK, I'll take the job. Through this position, Cooperman became a Wall Street legend. Buy low and sell high. You know, value investing, that's my approach. I don't know, I don't consider myself a legend. You know, when I worked at Goldman, I got up at 530 in the morning. I slept in New York City on the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. I worked very hard. I traveled 90 days a year around the world. And I guess if you live long enough, you become a legend. When I joined Goldman, I think they were earning $5 million a year. And I made a partner, I know, in 1976. They earned $40 million. Year I retired, they made $1.8 billion. I was there for the whole run. So the intuition of going with people I liked rather than just for the money. When I left Goldman, I was worth about $100 million. I don't feel guilty about the wealth I've accumulated. I've accumulated it honestly and through hard work. And I figured out there's only four things you could do with money. First thing you could do with money is spend it on yourself. But I'm not a sports enthusiast, I'm not an art collector. And my income exceeded what I needed. Second thing you do with money is give all your money to your kids. But if you have a lot of money, giving all your money to your kids is a mistake because you're depriving them of self-achievement. Third thing you could do with money, give it to the government. Well, if your schnook gives the government money, you don't have to. You pay your taxes. You don't volunteer to pay more. The fourth thing you do with money is you recycle back into society and try to make the world a better place. And that's what I've chosen to do with my money. It's the arts and education and health care and inner city kids that takes up most of my travel giving. There's no shortage of worthy causes. You know, I find that the only thing in short supply is money. Cooperman, who moved to New Jersey in 1968, has already given away several hundred million dollars to various recipients. These gifts range from $100 million to Livingston, New Jersey's St. His latest gift is a $20 million donation to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, also known as the NJPAC, to build the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center is the country's most diverse performing arts center in terms of its audiences, its staff and its programming. And we are in service to a variety of communities, not only in Newark, but throughout the state. I first met Lee Cooperman about a dozen years ago when I was early in the game as the CEO of this place, and education was the thing that changed the world for him. And he made a decision when he became wealthy to give back. His humility around his giving is the thing that I find so appealing and so attractive and so endearing. He doesn't make a big deal about it. He just does it. We spend about $7 million a year on education programs, community engagement programs, and arts and well-being initiatives. The financial return on those is almost non-existent. Do we depend on donors? Absolutely. So we can't survive without philanthropy. We wouldn't be able to be in service to community the way we are. And that's one of the reasons that I appreciate Lee Cooperman so much, because he believes, as we believe, that philanthropy can change the world. After six years of planning, NJPAC received an award of nearly $200 million in Economic Development Authority tax credits and a capital campaign that raised nearly a quarter billion dollars. And that capital campaign helped us fund the education center that we'll be building, that Lee gave the initial gift to, and enabled us to build our endowment. Though Cooperman had been a longtime patron and donor, to secure his $20 million donation in 2018, NJPAC's president and CEO traveled to Florida to meet with him. I pitched him the idea of this education center. He paid attention to that pitch for about 15 minutes and then said, let's go have lunch. And by the end of the lunch, he said, I think this is something that we'll do. I'll let you know. And I went home. And on Monday, he called me and said, we're going to give you $20 million for this project. It was not a long process, as what I've learned about Lee is that he's a quick decider. Well, they were very, very committed and they're very engaged. And I want to support winners. And I think he has a good dream and he's very committed to what he's doing. And I want to support him. In all, the Cooperman Center will cost $70 million to build and will be completed and opened in 2027. So why is this transformation so important for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center? Being a catalyst for economic rebirth of our home city has been in our mission since the beginning of our creation. In fact, this is this is a continuation of our campus plan. So it's going to be this whole area. That whole area will be the residential development with the street level retail. Then across the street will be the Cooperman Center with two vistas coming out of the front of the building. One focused right here at the Reimagined Plaza and the other window focused right down this street that we're creating between the high rise and the mid rise. Everything we're building is being built on parking lots. We are a city that is blessed or cursed with a lot of parking lots. So there is a lot of opportunity for new construction to occur without displacement. We are an under-resourced city here in Newark and the types of initiatives that we're going to be able to deliver to the community for free, we hope will be life enhancing and sometimes life changing. We reach 100,000 kids and families every year with the existing education and community and arts and health programs that we're doing. Those numbers will exponentially get bigger once the Cooperman Center opens. My whole career in Wall Street was trying to find and pick stocks. So in philanthropy, I'm trying to pick people who don't have financial resources but can use the financial resources to execute their dream. Cooperman hopes that the generations to come after him will follow in his philanthropic footsteps. Be a capitalist with a heart. The best economic system is capitalism. Very few people are looking to get out of this country, but there are many people looking to get into the country, which is a function of our economic system. And what's going to happen to his money when he's no longer around to spend it? The proud father is leaving that up to his children and grandchildren to decide. My legacy to my kids is where I don't give away my lifetime. All goes into a foundation and they'll give it away. And they give them the ability to give away 50, 60, 70 million dollars a year is a very nice gift. If they find working at one foundation cumbersome, we have my code for not getting along. We have different interests that they can go their separate way. Much to my pleasure, they basically said, there's no reason to even think that way. We want to work together.