The Wall Street hedge fund manager who recently rescinded a $100 million donation to the University of Pennsylvania on anti-Semitism grounds is now being sued over allegations that the company refused to pay a multimillion-dollar bonus owed to one of its former executives.
Ross Stevens, who made headlines last December when he withdrew a huge donation to his Ivy League alma mater citing the school’s weak response to anti-Israel protests on campus, is now being sued by Eric Goralski, who was head of client strategy at Stevens’ fund, Stone Ridge Asset Management.
Goralski, a former banker at Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers, alleges in a lawsuit filed Aug. 2 in New York state court that Stevens reneged on promises to pay him huge annual bonuses of as much as $50 million over six years.
This is despite the fact that New York-based Stoneridge, which invests in cryptocurrencies, art and fintech loans, recently disclosed that it made more than $1 billion in trading profits last year.
“This is about the greed side of Wall Street that everyone thinks exists,” a source close to both groups told The Washington Post, “and it does exist.”
The lawsuit comes after Stevens publicly clashed with former University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill, who said in congressional testimony on Dec. 5 that she was “appalled” that McGill had not confirmed that calls to genocide Jews violated university policy.
Two days after the hearing, Stevens said he was withdrawing a planned $100 million donation.
McGill resigned four days later, on December 11th.
A University of Pennsylvania spokesman did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.
After Goralski left Stoneridge in 2018, Stevens promised him a $4.4 million windfall in 2019, then paid him $9 million the following year and $10 million the year after that, Goralski’s lawsuit alleges.
But Goralski complained that he only received $700,000 from Stevens in 2019 before the funds dried up.
According to the complaint, Goralski helped Stevens, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who briefly worked at Goldman Sachs, found Stone Ridge in 2012, which focused on reinsurance and alternative investments such as Bitcoin.
Court filings The two companies claim that their relationship had “swollen” due to a “long-standing dispute” over “the treatment of equity interests of co-founders and early key hires.”
“It was either do it Ross’s way or give up,” a source close to the couple added. “Ross was really upset that Eric was questioning his decision-making.”
Mr. Goralski, 52, who declined to comment, now runs boutique investment firm Mobilize Capital Partners.
Lawyers representing Stone Ridge Asset Management in the lawsuit did not respond to The Post’s emails and calls seeking comment.
Goralski, in his lawsuit, alleged that the two had “differences of opinion regarding the direction of the business,” which manages more than $20 billion in assets. He made a series of LinkedIn posts over the summer implicitly criticizing Stoneridge.
In a post last month, he described his time at the company, saying there had been “a buildup of energy that wasn’t entirely positive.”
“I witnessed a constant tension between chosen values, like ‘Focus’ written on a coffee mug, and the euphoria of unveiling the next big new idea,” Goralski writes. “Focus almost always won out, but there were plenty of interesting discussions happening behind closed doors.”
According to the filing, Stoneridge’s lawyers served Goralski with a cease and desist letter on July 26 regarding the LinkedIn posts, alleging that the posts violated his 2018 severance agreement and that “the posts specifically reference Mr. Goralski’s employment and relationship with Stoneridge and its founder (Ross Stevens).”
According to court documents, Stoneridge’s lawyers warned him last month that if he did not immediately stop posting on social media, they would claw back money he made in the two years before he left the company.
According to the lawsuit, Stoneridge lawyers drafted a letter to Goralski in 2018 promising to “quietly step down” in exchange for paying him millions of dollars. The 2018 offer, documented in court documents, indicates that he was to be formally retained as a “special counsel” to Stevens.
The lawsuit describes the agreement as “the pretext Stoneridge needed to justify the payment of significant compensation to him after the divorce.”
According to the contract, the bonus payment was at the CEO’s “discretion,” but the lawsuit alleges that Stevens told Goralski, “I don’t care what it says on the paperwork. I’m going to pay you this amount.”
