He Still Runs $121 Billion - A Crude, Sexist Joke Cost Ken Fisher $4 Billion In Assets

Some big investors were quick to drop the money manager. But his sales machine is doing just fine

- Sabrina Willmer

Ken Fisher ranks among the most successful money managers in America. But you can reach one of his main offices only by driving up a steep and curving country road in Northern California. A compound of simple wood-shingled buildings, it sits atop a peak with sweeping views of redwoods and Half Moon Bay. “Kings Mountain Country Store,” reads a weathered sign near the entrance, lined with moss-covered boulders.

An avowed cheapskate who buys shoes at Walmart, Fisher picked up this property years ago at a fire-sale price. It had been a commercial chinchilla farm in the 1940s. Fisher, 69, grew up here in San Mateo County and remembers the freedom he had as a child, hitchhiking in the area or taking the train to nearby San Francisco as a 10-year-old. “It was just a marvelous world that used to exist—just so free and so different,” he says.

Speaking of the business he built, he says, “I had this vision, which was like a sort of preindustrial age family, like a farm.” His wife and children have all worked for the company, Fisher Investments, and the Fishers once lived at this Woodside, Calif., compound, where a statue of a bull fighting a bear adorns a back patio. Some of his former employees—referring to the way many are molded in the founder’s image, or Fisherized—have called his firm the cult on the hill.