Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio once fumed that “there’s piss on the floor” in the men’s bathroom at Bridgewater Associates’ headquarters — and implemented his famed mantra of “radical transparency” to crack what became known internally as the “piss case,” according to a new book.
The explosive exposé by reporter Rob Copeland, titled “The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend,” hit bookstores on Tuesday and detailed one fateful day at Bridgewater’s Westport, Conn., office when Dalio excused himself from a meeting to use the restroom.
The 74-year-old billionaire noticed pee on the floor in front of a urinal and, per Copeland’s account, found it “inconceivable that it could be an accident,” per an excerpt of the book published by New York Magazine.
“If people can’t aim their f–king pee, they can’t work here,” Dalio said before angrily emailing his 1,000-staff workforce: “There’s piss on the floor.”
Dalio went on to prove just how serious he was about the “radical transparency” he promoted, beginning with summoning the hedge fund’s head of facilities for questioning about the puddle of urine, per Copeland’s book.
Staffers were then assigned to guard the restroom, standing outside and making notes of who entered and how clean the floors were when they left, with a member of the cleaning crew on standby to mop up the floor.
Dalio also ordered that stickers be placed on the urinals to serve as a target for the men working at Bridgewater’s Connecticut nerve center — and then examined the exact placement of the stickers, according to Copeland.
New urinals were even installed “for testing,” Copeland wrote.
However, after all that, the case went cold. Dalio was never able to get to the bottom of the piss case, the book revealed.
A spokesperson for Bridgewater called the piss case anecdote “exaggerated to a ridiculous degree and totally false.”
Dalio also addressed the book in a post on LinkedIn, vowing that it was the only “attention” he was going to give on Copeland’s tell-all.
“The book should be taken for what it is, which is another one of those sensational and inaccurate tabloid books written to sell books to people who like gossip,” Dalio penned in the post shared Tuesday.
He even went on to suggest that Copeland published “The Fund” as a type of revenge against Bridgewater after he applied for a job at the firm and was rejected.
Dalio continued: “Like all such books, there is a backstory behind it. In brief, the author applied for a job at Bridgewater and was rejected. He then became an investigative reporter at a prominent newspaper and made a career of writing distorted stories about me and Bridgewater, at first in articles and now in this book.”
Copeland’s book, meanwhile, insists the pee-on-the-floor incident was just one painstaking example of how Dalio ran his hedge fund, obsessing over upholding what he called his “Principles,” which “held that no matter was too small for investigation.”
Among the hundreds of principles, one that stood out said: “People have to value getting at truth so badly that they are willing to humiliate themselves to get it.”
Other principles conveyed in Bridgewater’s “Transparency Library” of instructional videos told staffers to “probe” each other’s work on a daily basis, have the “ability to self-assess” and “push through to results,” per Copeland’s tell-all book.
That self assessment was the most evident in Bridgewater’s public rating system that involves real-time polls and a one-to-ten scale that Dalio has insisted promotes “independent thinking” rather than a cult-like mentality.
The rating system grades each of Bridgewater’s employees in dozens of categories, per Copeland’s account, that saw lower-paid workers getting negative ratings for failing to restock the office sodas and assistants facing scrutiny if their bosses were late to a meeting.
Bus drivers could also get low scores if the company transportation was too hot or too cold, according to the book.
Dalio in 2017 published a best-selling autobiography titled “Principles” to bring his fundamentals beyond Bridewater’s roughly 1,500 staffers to the general public — and then turned it into a children’s book in 2021.
Ahead of the release of “The Fund,” Dalio reportedly worked keep ugly anecdotes such as the piss case under wraps, hiring a team of high-priced lawyers to threaten the publication of the book.
Earlier this year, Dalio and Bridgewater — the world’s largest hedge fund with as much as $168 billion under management — threatened a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, according to letters obtained by The Post.
Despite Dalio’s best efforts, the 352-page book, which claimed in promotional materials it “punctures this carefully-constructed narrative of the benevolent business titan,” was published by Macmillan on Tuesday anyways.
Now, the explosive biography is poised to get the Hollywood treatment, sources told The Post, revealing that Amazon Studios scooped up the rights to the book last month with plans to develop it as a scripted series.
