Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

David Einhorn grew up in Milwaukee, graduated from Cornell University, and started his career at SC Fundamental Value Fund under Gary Siegler and Peter Collery. He co-founded Greenlight Capital in 1996 at age 27, with $900,000 in startup capital, half borrowed from his parents. The fund has run from a single floor near Grand Central in New York City and employs approximately 25 people.

Greenlight is a long-short value-oriented hedge fund. It does not use borrowed money or leverage, which is unusual in the industry. It holds concentrated positions and makes large directional bets, both long and short, based on fundamental analysis.

The Lehman Short

David Einhorn investments became globally known in 2008. Einhorn had been publicly critical of Lehman Brothers' financial statements for months before the bank collapsed. He presented at the Ira Sohn Investment Conference in May 2008 and laid out his analysis of Lehman's balance sheet in detail, arguing the bank had understated its losses and overstated its assets.

Lehman's CEO Dick Fuld dismissed his concerns publicly. Six months later, Lehman filed for bankruptcy in the largest such filing in US history. Greenlight's short position generated significant returns. Einhorn detailed the full story in his 2010 book Fooling Some of the People All of the Time.

His other notable short calls have included Allied Capital, Chewy, and various tech companies he has argued are overvalued.

Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund has noted that the investors who earn real respect over time are those who do the actual work of deep fundamental analysis rather than trading momentum or following consensus. Einhorn's public short pitches have been wrong on occasion and right more often than most, and he does them in public, which is a form of intellectual accountability that most investors avoid entirely. Angel Squad members develop similar rigor in early-stage evaluation.

The Market Structure Critique

Einhorn has been one of the more vocal critics of what he calls the structural breakdown of value investing in recent markets. He has argued that passive investing, the dominance of momentum strategies, and the absence of meaningful price discovery have created a market where fundamental analysis is underweighted. He presented this thesis at the Sohn Conference in April 2024 under the phrase "a fundamentally broken market."

His current long positions reflect a specific value approach. Greenlight's largest position as of 2025 is Green Brick Partners, a homebuilder in the Texas and Georgia markets. He has also held Brighthouse Financial, CONSOL Energy, and positions in European industrials.

The Poker Career

Einhorn is a serious poker player. He won $659,730 in the 2006 World Series of Poker and donated his winnings to charity. He has competed in the Main Event multiple times and finished deep in major tournaments. He describes poker and investing as having significant intellectual overlap: both require evaluating incomplete information under uncertainty and making probabilistic bets while managing risk.

The "Fartcoin" Remark

Einhorn made a comment in January 2025 that got significant attention: he described current market conditions as having reached the "Fartcoin" stage of the market cycle, a reference to an actual meme cryptocurrency called Fartcoin that had briefly reached a $1 billion market cap. The comment encapsulated his broader critique: that capital markets had become so speculation-driven that fundamental valuation analysis was becoming irrelevant to short-term price discovery.

His 2025 letter to investors reported 9.0% returns for the year, against 17.9% for the S&P 500. All of Greenlight's gains came from macro investments; the long-short equity portfolio lagged. He has been candid that navigating markets where momentum and passive flows dominate is harder for a value-oriented fund than markets where fundamentals drive prices.

He remains one of the most consistent long-term performers in the industry. Since inception in 1996 through 2025, Greenlight has returned 3,406% cumulatively versus 1,693% for the S&P 500, generating $6.1 billion for investors net of fees.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has observed that the best investors tend to have mental models from outside finance that they apply to investment decisions. Einhorn's poker discipline and his approach to short selling both reflect the same core skill: being willing to take a position that the market disagrees with and then sizing it appropriately relative to your actual conviction. Angel Squad members develop that calibration at hustlefund.vc/squad.