Christopher Hohn was born in 1966 in Addlestone, Surrey, the son of a Jamaican-born car mechanic of European descent and a legal secretary from Hailsham, East Sussex.

He was a pupil at St Paul’s County Secondary School in Addlestone, gaining 13 O Levels. He subsequently studied at the University of Southampton, from which he graduated in 1988 with first-class honours in accounting and business economics. To help cover his student loan repayments, he worked briefly at Coopers & Lybrand. While at university, a tutor suggested he apply to Harvard Business School, where he completed the Master of Business Administration programme, graduating in 1993 as a Baker Scholar, placing him among the top 5% of all graduates.

After graduating, Hohn worked for the private equity group Apax Partners in 1994. In 1996, he went to work for Perry Capital, a hedge fund on Wall Street. By 1998, he had been promoted to the head of Perry’s London operations.

The children’s investment fund

In 2003, Hohn set up his own hedge fund, The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI). TCI regularly donated to a connected charitable fund, The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), run by his then-wife, Jamie. The original formula involved transfers of 0.5% of the fund’s assets each year, plus an additional 0.5% for each year in which the fund achieved returns of more than 11%.

“The original mission in setting up CIFF was to improve the lives of children in developing countries who live in poverty. This hasn’t changed. I want to solve problems, not make grants.” – Chris Hohn stated on the Fund’s own website.

The fund now manages $77 billion and has large, concentrated positions in a handful of stocks, including Microsoft, Visa and GE Aerospace.

It was reported at the time that Hohn established the formulaic charitable link in order to motivate himself. Coinciding with the couple’s divorce proceedings, changes set in motion in 2012 led to the splitting up of the fund and the foundation. The fund no longer donates money to the foundation on a contractual basis, though it occasionally continues to do so on a more discretionary basis.

Personal wealth

Hohn received dividend payments of over £ 1 billion between 2015 and 2019. Also in 2019, it was reported that he had built a €730m stake in Heathrow Airport via a range of investment companies, which jointly took a 4% stake in Spanish multinational Ferrovial. For the year from March 2019, he paid himself $479 million, the highest annual amount paid to a person in the UK.

In December 2023, Hohn received a £275 million dividend from TCI Fund Management. His current personal wealth, as estimated by Forbes, is believed to be around £9.2 billion.

Investor activism

Hohn is considered to be an ‘activist investor’. Shareholder or investor activism is a form of activism in which shareholders use equity stakes in a corporation to put pressure on its management. For example, a fairly small stake (less than 10% of outstanding shares) may be enough to launch a successful campaign. In comparison, a full takeover bid is a much more costly and difficult undertaking.

The goals of shareholder activism may range from financial (increasing shareholder value through changes in corporate policy, etc.) to non-financial (disinvestment from particular countries, or sectors, etc.). 

As an example of this, in November 2022, Hohn, on behalf of TCI, wrote an open letter to the CEO of Alphabet and Google. In the letter, Hohn stated that Google’s headcount was too high and should be reduced. He also stated that there should be greater effort to reduce losses in Waymo, its self-driving unit.

In January, 2023, Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs, which was 6% of its workforce. On the same day, Hohn issued another letter to Pichai stating that there should be further job cuts with a target of 20%. The letter also stated that management should address excessive employee compensation.

Climate change

Hohn is an outspoken advocate of urgent action on climate change. In conjunction with the TCI fund, he launched the “Say on climate” initiative. The idea of the campaign is to make companies disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and their plans to manage them, and to give shareholders an advisory vote on the plans and their results. The initiative was first implemented by Aena, Unilever, Glencore, and CN.

In 2019, Hohn donated £50,000 to environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 donated by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. None of the Charity’s money was spent on civil disobedience, it was claimed. As of January 2022, Hohn was the single biggest individual donor to Extinction Rebellion.

Donations

By 2019, Forbes listed Hohn’s lifetime giving at $4.5 billion.

In April 2020, he made a £2.4 million donation to purchase around 100 SAMBA II machines to test for COVID-19.

In April 2025, in response to the Trump administration’s desire to starve its children, in this instance, by cutting off USAID funds, Hohn donated to MANA Nutrition, a company in Georgia, to enable continued production of peanut butter paste for malnourished children; peanuts being a particularly prevalent produce of that state.

After a 2025 watchdog report indicated that between 2014 and 2023, Hohn had sent $553 million to US political and environmental advocacy organisations, His foundation announced that it would stop giving money to U.S.-based groups, citing uncertainty about the U.S. policy environment governing foreign funding

Hohn has also been a major donor to the Arabella Advisors network via the New Venture Fund and Windward Fund. The Arabella Advisors network is an umbrella group that raises ‘dark money’ (i.e. political influence money which the entire US political system is beholden to) for Democratic causes.

Personal life

In October 1995, he married Jamie Cooper, a fellow Harvard graduate student from Chicago, whom he had met at a party during his studies. Upon marriage, they took each other’s surnames to become Cooper-Hohn, although he was still widely known as just ‘Hohn’. The couple went on to have four children, including triplets.

They divorced 19 years later, with his settlement towards her being around £337 million, the largest ever divorce settlement in English legal history at the time.

He has since married Kylie Richardson, a PhD from Harvard PhD and CEO of the educational foundation LightEn, based in London’s West End.

Hohn, who practices yoga and does not eat meat, was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) by Her Majesty, The Queen, in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to philanthropy and international development.