The philanthropist who has spent billions promoting democracy talks populism, Trump and powerful enemies

Around three decades ago, George Soros was introduced to a brash property magnate over dinner at a country house in the Catskills, upstate New York. Donald Trump was about to launch a New York office block, and he asked Soros to be his lead tenant. Soros was already a spectacularly successful financier, but told Trump he simply couldn’t afford it. “And that was just because I didn’t like him,” he tells me, smiling.

It’s not hard to see why Soros took such an instant dislike. Worldly, bookish, curious and somewhat shy, he tends to find other businessmen boring. He is unimpressed by celebrity, preferring the company of intellectuals, journalists and anyone he feels knows more about a given subject than he does. As a hedge fund manager, he was more likely to spend his free time reading and writing philosophy texts than hanging out on the golf course. If you had to conjure up a personality that is the polar opposite of the current president of the United States, it would look a lot like Soros.