Taleb holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in management science from the University of Paris (Paris 9 Dauphine, Management Science). He is currently Visiting Professor of Marketing (Cognitive Science) at London Business School, the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) is a literary essayist, epistemologist, polymath scholar of randomness and knowledge, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance. As a pioneer of complex financial derivatives, he had as a "day job" a lengthy senior trading and financial mathematics career in New York City's Wall Street firms, before he started a second career as a scholar in the epistemology of chance events and focus on his project of mapping how to live and act in a world we do not understand, and how to come to grips with randomness and the unknown — which includes his black swan theory of unexpected rare events.
Taleb's extremely idiosyncratic literary approach consists in providing a modern-day brand of philosophical tale by mixing narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, with erudition and scientific commentary.
In an article in The Times, Bryan Appleyard described Taleb as "now the hottest thinker in the world".
Taleb originates from Amioun, Lebanon. His political Greek Orthodox Levantine family saw its prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War which began in 1975. He is the son of Dr. Najib Taleb, an oncologist and researcher in anthropology, and Minerva Ghosn. Both sides of his family were politically prominent in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox community: on his mother's side, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were both deputy prime ministers of Lebanon; on his father's side, his grandfather was a supreme court judge and, in 1861, his great-great-great-great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.
Empirica LLC, the firm formerly owned by Taleb, owns interests in hedge funds and operates a research laboratory, but the bulk of the business consists in providing portfolio protection strategies for hedge funds. Taleb is an advisor of Universa Investments, an investment firm specializing in asymmetric payouts, power-law distributions, and behavioral biases.
As a trader, Taleb has said he took a skeptical and anti-mathematical approach to risk and uncertainty and had a severe distrust of models and statisticians and a contempt for finance academics. He has held the positions of:
Taleb considers himself far less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness who used trading to attain his independence and freedom from authority, as he writes in his book, Fooled by Randomness, which became a cult book on Wall Street after it was first published in 2001. It was translated into 23 languages.
Taleb, a polyglot, has a literary fluency in English, French, and classical Arabic, a conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish, and reads classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew, as well as the Canaanite script. He is a native French speaker
Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Rule of Chance in Life and in the Markets 2nd Ed.