In a cryptic LinkedIn post Tuesday, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio warned that judgements based on gossip were “threatening to our well-being.”
The chairman and chief investment officer of the world’s largest hedge fund wrote that following the news has become more like watching a soap opera, with the characters being “high profile people in government and on other big stages.” These people become subject to what Dalio called “trials by gossip.”
“While gossiping might be entertaining like watching soap operas, it leaves us judging and sentencing people without truth and justice,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for Dalio said the post was “in response to all such things for a long time rather than anything that happened lately.”
Bridgewater came under the spotlight in November, when the Wall Street Journal reported that the hedge fund paid a settlement of $1 million to a female employee who was allegedly pushed out of the firm after engaging in a consensual relationship with Bridgewater’s co-CIO Greg Jensen, who Dalio mentored. In a statement to the Journal, a Bridgewater spokesman called the report an “uninformed mispresentation of what actually occurred.”
Following the article’s online publication, Dalio told the Journal in a statement that he “would not have tolerated the pattern of behavior inaccurately described by the Wall Street Journal.”
The Bridgewater founder has taken to LinkedIn more frequently in the past year to weigh in on issues like politics and the economy. Most recently he shared his thoughts on the GOP’s proposed tax changes.
[II Deep Dive: Ray Dalio’s Tax Reform Bets: Florida, Nevada, Arizona]
In Tuesday’s post, he called gossip a “time-consuming waste of time,” arguing that it hurts productivity in addition to being an unjust source of judgement.
“While there are of course important instances in which the media shines light on bad behaviors, which can be a force for good, if we as consumers don’t hold ourselves and the purveyors of gossip to higher standards of truth and justice, I fear for where we are headed,” he concluded.
At the end of the post, Dalio asked whether his LinkedIn followers shared his concerns. By and large, commentors on the post did.
