Bridgewater Associates

Ray Dalio's hedge fund maintains $136.5 billion in assets under management as of November 2025, making it the world's largest. But the numbers tell only part of the story. Bridgewater operates as a social experiment: what happens when you engineer primate coalition dynamics into a corporate structure?

The mechanism is 'radical transparency.' Every meeting is recorded. Every employee rates colleagues on 100+ attributes through the 'Dot Collector' system. All criticism is public. All decision-making processes are visible. In January 2025, Bridgewater cut 90 employees—7% of its global workforce—demonstrating that even transparent systems face resource constraints. The system creates what biologists observe in primate troops: constantly visible relationships where status and competence are never ambiguous.

First-year turnover runs 30%, mirroring juvenile dispersal in social species. Individuals who can't handle transparent hierarchies self-select out quickly. Those who remain show 85% job satisfaction and average 7-year tenure—high for the hedge fund industry. The filter is brutal but effective: only those who thrive under continuous evaluation survive.

The investment results validate the model. Pure Alpha, Bridgewater's flagship strategy, delivered 11.3% in 2024, then posted 26.4% returns in the first nine months of 2025—outpacing major indices during a volatile period. The 30-year average return sits at 12% annually. The performance comes from what Dalio calls 'idea meritocracy': decisions follow evidence-based debate rather than hierarchy. When everyone's competence is quantified in real-time through dot ratings, the best ideas surface regardless of who proposes them.

Dalio stepped back from day-to-day management in 2022 but remained on the board and mentored Chief Investment Officers until August 2025, when he fully divested and resigned. The transition tested whether the culture could survive its founder. Early 2025 results suggest yes—the transparency infrastructure persists independent of Dalio's presence.

The broader question is whether radical transparency scales. Bridgewater's system works with 1,200+ employees (before the January 2025 cuts), but coalition formation in primate troops rarely exceeds 150 individuals—Dunbar's number. Bridgewater's answer: technology-mediated transparency through recording and rating systems. Whether this remains stable as the firm grows, or whether it represents a local maximum that can't expand further, remains unknown. But as an experiment in engineering information symmetry into human organizations, Bridgewater stands alone.