3 LI execs on Forbes top earners list

Three Long Island hedge fund executives are among the best compensated in the world, with a combined income of $2.35 billion last year, a new report said.

The three fund managers drew their earnings at Renaissance Technologies, in East Setauket, with $20 billion in assets, Forbes magazine said in its list of the top 40 hedge fund earners. Renaissance funds earned net returns as high as 33 percent in 2011, the report said.

The entire list included hedge fund managers from Hong Kong, Switzerland, London, Singapore and the United States. Most were in the New York metropolitan area.

Topping the list, with $3 billion in compensation, was Ray Dalio, 62, of Bridgewater Associates in Westport, Conn.

Ranked second, with $2.1 billion in earnings, was Long Island resident and Renaissance founder James Simons, 73, a former math professor at Stony Brook University who retired as chief executive but is still active on the hedge fund's board.

In a tie for 16th were the co-chief executives at Renaissance, Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, who each earned about $125 million. Renaissance is a so-called quant, or quantitative, fund, with a strategy based on mathematical formulas.

Brown is "talkative and competitive, he's socially liberal and fiscally conservative, owns one home and drives a Prius," Forbes said. "He wrote a computer program to seat people at his wedding. Has ridden a unicycle in the office. Is the son of Henry Brown, who invented the money-market fund."

Mercer, a "former IBM language recognition specialist, joined Renaissance in 1993," the report said, adding: "politically conservative . . . Has huge model train in home basement."