A £500 birthday gift from his gran started a financier’s career – and now he’s worth a staggering £11.5billion.
Michael Platt, a hedge fund manager from Preston, started investing when he was just 14 thanks to the present from his grandmother.
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The 53-year-old, who is the co-founder and chief executive of BlueCrest Management, has increased his fortune in the past year by £1.5bn, to £11.5bn, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
Platt, who claims never to have suffered an annual loss, is said to spend a lot of his wealth on art, which he displays in the crypt of a deconsecrated church in Marylebone, central London.
The collection includes a black Christ in an electric chair beside skulls, stags’ heads, 5bn-year-old meteorites, a Japanese woman riding a walrus and the levitation of St John the Baptist.
Other pieces in the collection include works by taxidermist Polly Morgan, the Turner prize-winner Keith Tyson and Reece Jones.
Platt reportedly also owns a Bombardier Challenger private jet and homes in London, Switzerland and the US.
His first investments, thanks to his gran, were in Britain’s privatised utilities and he went on to study maths and economics at the London School of Economics.
After graduating from university, he joined JP Morgan, where he gains a number of rapid promotions before he founded BlueCrest Management in 2000.
The company is now regarded as one of the biggest private investment firms in the world.
In 2022, it generated returns as high as 153 per cent.
Platt also made a brief appearance on the US TV show, Billions.
He is the tenth wealthiest person in Britain, according to the list, just behind Kirsten and Jorn Rausing who are said to be worth £12bn.
There are now 171 billionaires in the UK this year, according to The Sunday Times list, the first fall for 14 years.
The combined wealth of the UK billionaires is £683.856bn, an increase of £30.734bn, or 4.5 per cent, on the total wealth of the billionaires in last year’s Rich List.
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