Jamie Dinan

James Gerard Dinan was born to a Roman Catholic family in 1959 in Baltimore, Maryland, one of five children of Robert and Jeannette Dinan.[3] His father was a textile engineer and his mother a homemaker.[3] In 1969, the family moved to Paxton, Massachusetts.[3] In 1977, Dinan graduated from the private Bancroft School.[4] He then went on to earn a B.S. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics[3] in 1981.[5] While at the University of Pennsylvania, Dinan joined Alpha Chi Rho, a northeastern fraternity.[3] In 1981, he took a job with stock research firm, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ).[3] In 1985,[6] Dinan earned a M.B.A. from Harvard University.[1]

In 1985, he took a job at the merger arbitrage firm Kellner DiLeo & Company.[3] In 1987, the market crashed and he lost his entire $600,000 in savings.[3] In 1991, he was able to raise $3.6 million from his former DLJ colleagues and started his own hedge fund named York Capital (named after the street he was then living on, York Avenue).[3] In 1993, his fund earned credibility with a 33.8 percent return and by 2000, the fund had over $610 million in assets.[3] In 2010, he sold 33% of York to Credit Suisse for $425 million.[1] In 2011, he made a $1 million donation to the Museum of the City of New York.[7] In July 2014, Dinan gained partial ownership of the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks.[8] In June 2017, he named two eventual successors to lead York Capital in the future.[9] In 2018, York Capital Management had $20.5 billion assets under management.[10]

Dinan is married to Elizabeth R. Miller,[11][12] and they have three children together.[1] Dinan lives in Manhattan and also owns homes in Westchester County, New York, Nantucket, Massachusetts, and on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy.[13]

• Welling, Kate; Gabelli, Mario (2018). Merger Masters: Tales of Arbitrage. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 178–189. ISBN 978-0-231-19042-8.

• TABB TV Replay: "Charlie Rose Interviews James Dinan" November 8, 2012