Jonathan Steinberg has been married to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo for more than two decades. Like his wife, Steinberg’s career is focused on the financial sector. Steinberg is the CEO of WisdomTree Investments, an asset management company in New York. He goes by the nickname “Jono.”
Heres’s what you need to know:
1. He Is the Son of Billionaire Wall Street Executive Saul Steinberg, Who Was Known as a ‘Corporate Raider’
Getty American businessman Saul Steinberg (1939 – 2012) , head of Leasco Equipment, at the offices of Rothschilds, his financial advisers in London, to discuss his bid for Robert Maxwell’s company Pergamon Press, 29th August 1969.
Steinberg had an early education in the world of finance. His father was Saul Steinberg, the Wall Street executive who became a billionaire by age 40, New York Magazine reported.
The elder Steinberg, who passed away in 2012, earned a reputation as a “corporate raider.” According to his obituary in the New York Times, he used a $25,000 loan from his father to launch a computer leasing company called Leasco in the 1960s. Saul Steinberg sold stock in the company in order to buy a much larger insurance company called Reliance Group Holdings.
As the Times explained, Saul Steinberg used cash from Reliance to fund “future corporate attacks.” He made headlines when he tried to take over corporations including Disney and Quaker State, as Forbes reported. The elder Steinberg also famously bought a 17,000-square-foot apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan that had once been the home of John D. Rockefeller Jr.
But Saul Steinberg’s fortunes went downhill in the late 1990s. Reliance had taken on heavy depts to support Saul Steinberg’s takeover attempts and lifestyle. His own mother, Anne Steinberg, sued him after he failed to repay a nearly $5 million loan, the Wall Street Journal reported. Steinberg stepped down as chairman of Reliance in 2001 and the insurance company filed for bankruptcy later that year, as the Philadelphia Enquirer explained. Saul Steinberg’s personal liquidation included the Park Avenue apartment’ the Guardian reported he sold it for at least $29 million.
2. Steinberg Began Buying Stocks at Age 13 & Dropped Out of the Wharton School of Business to Work at Bear Stearns
Steinberg described his father as his “idol” in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1989. Like his father, Steinberg developed an interest in finance from a young age. He told the newspaper he started acquiring stocks at age 13 and was “hooked” after one of his first investments in Abbott Laboratories “scored big.”
Steinberg attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania but did not graduate. According to a 2015 New York Times article, Steinberg had a “reading difficulty” and dropped out of college before his senior year.
But he did so with a job already lined up. Steinberg explained to the Tribune that he had become enamored with Wall Street during a summer internship at Bear Stearns and asked the executives to hire him full-time in 1986. “I told them I was not going back to school and if they wanted to hire me, it was now or never.”
3. Steinberg Started a Publishing Company In His 20s
Steinberg worked as an analyst within Bear Stearns’ Mergers and Acquisitions Department for less than three years before deciding to venture out on his own. Steinberg decided to try his hand at publishing.
As the Chicago Tribune reported, Steinberg used inherited stock money to buy a tabloid called the Penny Stock Journal which he renamed the Individual Investor. A few months later, he bought an even smaller publication called America`s Fastest Growing Companies. Both covered what the newspaper described as the “bargain basement of the stock market.” But Steinberg confidently told the Tribune, “We are looking at a market that no one is really looking at, and looking at the same fundamentals everyone else does. There are companies here that have earnings that are exploding. The bottom line is that if you subscribe to one of my papers, you should make more money than you would anywhere else.”
Steinberg grew his financial media company and as the Times reported in 1991, he took it public. By the time Steinberg married Bartiromo in 1999, he had renamed the company Individual Investor Group. But the dot-com crash of the early 2000s proved disastrous for his company and Steinberg’s magazines collapsed, Forbes reported. But as Steinberg told Funds Europe in 2018, he rebranded his company as an indexing business and changed the name to WisdomTree.
4. He Is the CEO of WisdomTree & Aims to Acquire $100 Billion Worth of Assets
LinkedInJonathan Steinberg is married to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo.
Steinberg transitioned his media company into an asset management enterprise in the early 2000s. WisdomTree Investments got into the business of Exchange Traded Funds in 2006 and according to its website, is now the “largest Exchange Traded Product (ETP) sponsor in the U.S.” Fidelity describes an exchange-traded fund as “a basket of securities you buy or sell through a brokerage firm on a stock exchange.”
The Financial Times reported in 2018 that WisdomTree managed more than $60 billion in assets. Steinberg told the publication he wants to grow that number to at least $100 billion. “[ETFs] is a game of scale. We have to be aggressive to succeed. We have to go all in to compete against BlackRock and Vanguard,” Steinberg said. “That is the problem that many of the traditional fund companies have. They don’t go all in.”
Steinberg literally wrote the book on how to identify a solid investment. His book Midas Investing: How You Can Make at Least 20% in the Stock Market This Year and Every Year was published in 1996. According to the summary on Amazon, the book is a “step-by-step guide to investment” which “shows how to pick money-making stocks, explains how to evaluate investment opportunities, and presents successful strategies and methods for making money in the stock market.”
5. Bartiromo & Steinberg Own a Manhattan Townhouse & a Home in the Hamptons
Steinberg and Bartiromo tied the knot in 1999. According to the wedding announcement in the New York Times, the celebration took place at Saul Steinberg’s Southampton house in the village of Quogue. Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein officiated the ceremony.
The couple has plenty of space to spread out. They bought a 5-story townhouse in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 2007 for $6.5 million, the Observer reported. The house has five bedrooms, a 39-foot backyard and a 342-square-foot family room.
On the weekends, Steinberg and Bartiromo decamp to their house on Long Island. Bartiromo told DuJour Magazine she and Steinberg enjoy biking and walking along the beach near their home in Westhampton. The couple spent even more time at his house at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. She told Dan’s Papers, a Hampton’s blog, that she anchored her Fox Business and Fox News shows from the Westhampton house.
Steinberg and Bartiromo do not have any children. But they do have a dog named Dusty.
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