CEO & Founder, Point72
Steve Cohen: "A Civic Duty" - Vision and Ownership of the New York Mets
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About Steven Cohen
On March 6, 2025, Rep. Steve Cohen announced he would not seek re-election, stating that a redistricting plan was designed to defeat him. He described the new district lines as erasing the political and cultural continuity of his Memphis-based constituency, which he had represented for 19 and a half years. Cohen said the redistricting was done for partisan reasons, adding, "This is for Donald Trump to get one more vote he thinks to stop him from being impeached." He noted that he had previously secured $400 million in federal funding for a new bridge in Tennessee, and argued that the all-Republican delegation would now lack a Democrat to approach a future Democratic administration for similar projects. On April 10, 2026, Cohen gave a teaching presentation on white spot syndromes and posterior uveitis. During the session, he discussed recent textbooks on uveitis and retina, and shared personal anecdotes about sangria and frozen lemonade.
Transcript (18 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
We are in Kiawah Island and we have a very special guest to bring you. Steve Cohen is here. He of course is the Chairman and Co-President of Point72, a long time veteran of Wall Street and hedge fund manager, and beginning his fourth season now as the owner, Chairman, and CEO of the New York Mets. It is great to have you on the program for the very first time.
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Steven Cohen0:21
Hey, you know, got to try everything once.
I
Interviewer0:24
Well, we'll see whether we get to do it more than once. I want to talk about so many things. I want to talk about sports, the business of sports, owning this team now. And then I want to get into the markets and what you're thinking about more broadly as well. But our way to start was actually the team this year, unfortunately. Given the win streak, or really the opposite in terms of where we are, how you think about that as an owner, but how you think about that as a hedge fund manager.
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Steven Cohen0:55
Well, I mean, we're only four games into the season, right? Be the equivalent of getting off a bad start, let's say, in a hedge fund year. You have a couple down days early in January, you still got a lot of time left to do what you normally do. And so, yeah, nobody wants to start 0-4, but it's early, right? During the season you're going to have losing streaks; we just happen to have one at the beginning.
I
Interviewer1:21
What is this like for you now? I mean, your whole life fundamentally changed. You're now in the public eye in a way that you haven't been. There's been a shift in the public eye, and now you're actually doing interviews and being more public. How do you feel about that?
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Steven Cohen1:38
It's something that I knew buying the Mets would be much more public, and I enjoy it. I realized I enjoyed it. I had no idea. When you sit behind screens for as long as I have and you kind of don't have to do that type of stuff, I actually enjoy interacting with the fans and doing press conferences. It's just a stretch for me, something different.
I
Interviewer2:05
How much of doing what you've done in business is similar or different to this in terms of the analytics? You trade stocks, you own a team, you trade players, right? Is it similar or totally different?
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Steven Cohen2:18
It's different. People think that I'm making the decisions, but I'm not. My baseball people are making the decisions. My job is that when they need me, they come to me and say what they want to do. I've never said no to anything. We have discussions, but those ideas are not coming from me. That's totally different from running my hedge fund. My hedge fund, I'm much more involved. But frankly, in my hedge fund, we have 200 portfolio managers. I'm not telling them what to do either. I give them risk limits and I'm available if they need to discuss anything. I'm used to operating in a very decentralized way and I give people a lot of rope.
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Interviewer3:07
There are big questions about baseball, both the valuations of these teams—you spent a lot of money on yours—and also how much money these teams spend on players. Different markets, big and small. What do you think of the system right now in baseball?
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Steven Cohen3:24
We're in one of those moments in baseball where people are thinking about what we like about the system and what we don't. You've got 30 owners, 30 different opinions, so we're still trying to figure it out. There's no doubt that smaller market clubs aren't crazy about large market clubs spending a lot of money, all within the rules that baseball sets out.
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Interviewer3:54
Does money buy winning? People say money doesn't buy love, clearly not.
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Steven Cohen3:58
We tried that. The real problem is if you're trying to build a team through free agency, that's a tough place to be because you're fighting the aging curve. You're buying players based on their previous history, but they're getting older and performance declines over time. What you really want to do is develop talent, which is no different from what I do in my hedge fund. That's the similarity between the two.
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Interviewer4:27
But you have been famous for cutting your losses in the hedge fund world. If things are not going well, you cut your losses. Can you do that in baseball?
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Steven Cohen4:36
I kind of did it last year. You're leading me to that question. I looked at it and realized that the team was probably not going to make the playoffs, and even if it did, probably wasn't going to get very far. At that point, we had a 15% chance of making the playoffs with a lot of teams in front of us. It would have been hard to pull off. We had contracts that weren't going to change in 2023 and 2024, so I did a complete pivot. I think I shocked baseball in the extent that I did it, but for me, it's just natural. I looked and said, 'I don't like the positions I have,' so I wanted to make a change.
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Interviewer5:32
You want a ring. How many years do you think it will take you to get there, and how much will it cost?
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Steven Cohen5:37
I don't care about the cost side. Over time, I think—
I
Interviewer5:42
But you don't think about this as philanthropic, do you?
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Steven Cohen5:45
That's exactly why I bought the team. In my original press conference, I said if I can make millions of people happy, how cool is that? I view it as a civic responsibility. Nobody wants to lose money forever and spend money without success. To me, success is not only winning the World Series but also developing a deep farm system that creates talent over and over.