The billionaire who made his first killing by predicting Black Monday in 1987 wants to redefine what it means to be a winner in this disruptive century—by deploying the free market to tackle income inequality.
Paul Tudor Jones, co-chair of Tudor Investment and one of the country’s top-earning hedge fund managers, is launching a new initiative called Just Capital that will offer a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to top performing companies on metrics ranging from employee pay and treatment to customer relations and environmental impact.
“There is too much inequality for us to continue the way we are,” Tudor told Fortune 500 CEOs and other business leaders gathered in San Francisco on Tuesday for this week’s Fortune Global Forum. Just Capital “will let the markets, let capitalism, drive the change.”
Tudor, founder of the Robin Hood Foundation, challenged the executives to consider whether a spike in CEO pay from 20 times that of the average employee to more than 300 today makes sense. “Are we really 15 times better than the people who would have sat in these seats [two decades ago] or is income sharing out of whack?”
“The average American doesn’t really trust the markets anymore,” Tudor said. “They don’t trust business, they don’t feel like corporations are there for them, linking them to this broader economy.”
Tudor’s operation polled 45,000 Americans multiple times to find out what business issues mattered most to them, and will use the findings to reward the winners in a range of categories with a “Just Capital” approval rating. Even if consumer behavior affects just 1% of corporate spending and worth, he calculates the change could affect $610 billion.
“Let’s rethink what it means to be a winner,” he declared, “and then go out and win this damn thing.”
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