Chase Coleman III’s wife gushed about her wealth in 2003 documentary ‘Born Rich’

Eighteen years before Chase Coleman III became the world’s top-earning hedge fund manager for 2020, his then-future wife appeared in a documentary chronicling what it’s like to grow up in America’s wealthiest families.  

Coleman, descendant of New York’s last Dutch governor in the 1600s, Peter Stuyvesant, landed at No. 1 on Bloomberg’s annual list of the top-earning hedge fund managers this week after adding $3billion to his fortune last year.   

The windfall is likely to make little difference to his wife Stephanie Ercklentz, who opened up about how she spent her entire life in the lap of luxury in the HBO documentary ‘Born Rich’ back in 2003.  

Unearthed footage from the film – which featured a host of famous trust-funders including Ivanka Trump and Georgina Bloomberg – shows a mid-20s Ercklentz gushing about her penchant for Gucci handbags. 

The daughter of Mai V. Hallingby-Harrison and Enno W. Ercklentz Jr – a successful international and corporate lawyer in New York – Ercklentz’s most memorable lines in the documentary referred to dating within her ‘social background’ to avoid getting admonished for buying $600 shoes.

‘I’ve never actually dated outside my social background. I guess it’s your compatibility, somebody on your same wavelength, understanding where you came from,’ she lamented.

‘I’m sure I would but he’d have to understand that I love going shopping somewhere and spending all this money on something and (someone of a lesser class) might get mad at me for being stupid and spending all this money on a Gucci purse but of course I’m like “I have to have it!”‘

In the film Erklentz bemoaned her own brief career in finance, describing how she was ‘worked to the ground’ at investment bank Merrill Lynch before throwing in the towel.  

‘”Welcome to Merrill Lynch and to working your butt off,'” Erklentz said of the job. 

‘I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot about finance. But I didn’t have the drive anymore. I would see people who would sit there and sit there and I was like: “My friends are at downtown Cipriani right now drinking bellinis and I’m here crunching numbers that are never going to get looked at.”‘ 

Two years after the documentary was released Erklentz married hotshot hedgefund manager Coleman at the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach. 

The couple purchased an entire floor of a building on Fifth Avenue from Veronica Hearst, daughter-in-law of William Randolph Hearst, for $36.5million in 2008, before buying another 15-room unit in the building for $52million in 2016. 

In 2018 the couple famously invited a small group of celebrities including Paris Hilton and Keith Richards’ daughter Theodora Richards, to come vandalize the second apartment before they started construction to combine both units. 

They also have a $19million property in Southhampton, New York, from which Coleman has been known to take a helicopter to the city for work. 

DailyMail.com published a ‘where are they now’ piece about ‘Born Rich’ in 2013, in which Erklentz revealed that she regretted being part of the film.  

‘I had approached this documentary as something lighthearted and satirical,’ she said. ‘As I look back, it wasn’t funny, and I certainly regret participating as this doesn’t reflect who I am or my values.’ 

In recent years Erklentz and her husband have kept a low profile – aside from the aforementioned spray-paint party in 2018.  

But they landed back in the headlines this week with Coleman’s induction into the top slot on Bloomberg’s richest hedge-funder list.  

Collectively, the 15 hedge fund managers on the list added $23.2billion to their personal fortunes in a year that saw the global economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic and accompanying lockdowns – more than the annual GDPs of Iceland or Zambia.

Coleman, who runs a hedge fund called Tiger Global that focuses on tech companies, benefited from bets placed on companies that ended up soaring during the pandemic. 

Some of his well-timed holdings? Pandemic darlings Zoom, which has gained 390 percent over the past year and Peloton, which is up more than 118 percent over the same time frame.  

The number crunchers at Bloomberg called Coleman’s holdings ‘a portfolio almost perfectly positioned for the unprecedented experience of billions of people stuck at home’.  

His fund as a whole returned 48 percent in 2020, far outstripping the broader US stock market, which gained around 16 percent.  

Meanwhile, not all of the people on the 2020 list did so well: No. 15 last year, Gabe Plotkin, head of Melvin Capital, lost around $460million personally, Bloomberg reports, in his bet against GameStop as retail investors pushed into the retailer and led its stock sharply higher. 

Fellow hedge funders said they thought Plotkin would stay the course and build back. 

Coleman, on the other hand, already has an estimated fortune of $4.5billion, according to Forbes, which ranked him as the 458th richest person in the world in 2019.

He is the founder of Tiger Global Management (TGM), which he set up at just 24 years old after being given the $25million seed money by Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, when he closed his fund in 2000.

Coleman, who grew up in the affluent Glen Head community on Long Island, New York, connected with Robertson through the elder’s son Spencer, who he was good friends with.  

While he has largely invested in new technologies, Coleman’s wealth goes back generations.

He is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York who ordered the construction of the wall after which Wall Street is named.

Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam, now New York, to the English in 1664.  

Coleman is a major donor to the Republican party and supported Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. He has also donated to Democratic candidates including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. 

All 15 of the hedge fund managers on Bloomberg’s list are men, the outlet noted, and their combined wealth is equivalent to more than the gross domestic product of Iceland or Zambia, according to The Guardian. 

Renaissance Technologies’ Jim Simons came in second place having made $2.6billion, while Israel Englander of Millennium Management was ranked third with $2.2billion.

Other entrants included New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, who made $1.6billion at Point 72 and Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, who made billions for the fund betting that stock markets would collapse early in the pandemic. Ackman took home $1.3billion.  

The rewards are ‘unlike anything the hedge-fund industry has ever seen,’ Bloomberg reported, with experts noting that the earnings illustrate the gulf between the super rich and the rest of the world more starkly than ever due to the pandemic, which has ravaged many businesses and drained personal savings.