This quant billionaire uses AI but turns to Hasidic thought for meaning

The black baseball cap looked ordinary at first glance, except for the small Star of David stitched on the front.

When Igor Tulchinsky sat down in The Jerusalem Post studio, arriving with an entourage and light security, I pointed to it.

He smiled and said it came from an Israeli special forces unit he had met.

That detail set the tone. Tulchinsky, the billionaire founder and CEO of WorldQuant, a global quantitative investment firm, does not usually present himself as a public Jewish figure. He is known in finance and tech circles for his work on models, predictions, and data. In our conversation, he spoke far more openly than usual about religion, Israel, and the way October 7 changed the tempo of his involvement. WorldQuant says the firm, founded in 2007, develops investment strategies across global markets using mathematical models called “alphas,” or signals that try to predict future price moves.

“Disbelief. Numbness.”

He was in New York. Before he had much time to process it, he said, a rabbi called with a request: fly the families of hostages to Washington so they could meet members of Congress.

“Will you pay for it?” he recalled being asked.

“And I said, yes, I’ll pay for it.”

That reply came quickly. The larger shift had been building for years.

That world can sound abstract, even sterile. Tulchinsky does not. He tells stories like a man who has spent a lifetime learning how quickly a person can be uprooted and how much can be rebuilt from scratch.

He left Minsk, Belarus, as a child. He told me he started immigrating at 10 and “finished” at 11, a phrase that sounded half-bureaucratic, half-comic. He remembers the move first through sensation.

“Part of me viewed it as a really good vacation,” he said. “It was really fun.”

He remembered bananas as a luxury of another universe.

“Getting out of Russia, where bananas were like, you know, once a year.”

Vienna made such an impression that he joked his stomach “got big in a week,” then went back to normal, “thank God.” The stress, he said, landed mostly on his parents, both professional musicians. He took in the movement and adapted.

His family lived in Queens, then in Richmond, Virginia, and then in other places. A lot of them.

“I think I’ve moved at least 30 times,” he said.

That kind of childhood can leave a person scattered. In his case, it seems to have trained something. He spoke about constant reinvention the way other people talk about the weather. I suggested it must have kept his mind flexible.

“I think it’s dopamine releasing,” he said.

That line felt very Tulchinsky. Even emotion arrives with a systems explanation.

The Jewish part of his childhood was real but thin in formal religious terms.

“Living in the Soviet Union, I was considered, and considered myself, Jewish,” he said. “But it was more of an ethnic factor.”

He said he had “very little exposure to religion” growing up while still feeling acutely aware that he belonged to the Jewish people. In the US, that started to change. A local community took his family in, celebrated holidays with them, and steered him toward a bar mitzvah at a Reform temple.

“We had no money,” he said. “I was wearing tennis shoes.”

He remembers getting $360 in gifts and, unlike many bar mitzvah boys, not blowing through it immediately.

That restraint fit the boy he described becoming. He started working at 13, first putting together a card catalog for someone’s library, then taking odd jobs. In Kansas, where he said teenagers could drive to work at 14, he bought a Commodore 64 and taught himself to program.

“Self-taught,” he said.

A math teacher connected him to a hospital job writing antibiotic dosage programs.

“Luckily, everybody lived,” he said, deadpan.

Then came a classified ad in Texas that promised money for making video games. He went with his mother, got the job, and started writing games for $20 an hour.

“It’s a long life,” he told me at one point, almost apologizing for the number of chapters.

The part of that life he has mostly kept out of public view is the Jewish and Israel-facing one.

I told him that, from the outside, I had not seen much about his Jewish philanthropy or Israel-related giving. He said the story started before October 7.

“In 2009, I opened my first office in Israel.”

Still, business was only part of the connection. Another track ran through Chabad.

He said that after moving to Connecticut in 2001, he became friendly with a local rabbi. One Torah lesson a week turned into years of study.

“That’s a lot of Torah lessons,” I told him.

“It built up,” he said.

Eventually, he became, in his words, a major supporter of Chabad institutions. He described trips to Israel that included time at the Ohel, the gravesite of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens, and later repeated visits to Israel with rabbis after October 7. These trips were jam-packed with events. He visited hostage families, wounded soldiers, communities hit in the massacre, and politicians. At first, he said, he gave money for urgent wartime needs through an organization. Later, he shifted toward trauma, PTSD centers, and hospitals.

“When someone in the hospital is happy to see you,” he said, “it goes both ways.”

He has chosen to keep much of that quiet.

“I did everything quietly,” he said when I asked if his support for Israel triggered backlash in the tech and finance worlds.

That quietness feels deliberate. Tulchinsky understands attention as both currency and liability.

He also understands frameworks. As the conversation moved from Jewish life to AI, the two subjects started to blend in a way I had not expected.

Tulchinsky uses AI heavily, both inside his company and in his own daily life. He says he is pushing it “everywhere within the company.” He also uses it for smaller things, including restaurant menus.

“I snap a picture and I say, what should I eat?”

He uses multiple platforms. In his description, ChatGPT is strong at expressing complicated ideas in language and proficient at grasping nuance and psychology. Other tools, he said, can be more mathematically sharp and more direct.

Then he said something that explained a lot about how he thinks. “I follow the Hasidic thinking,” he told me. “And I often derive with it from GPT. I say, explain this to me in Hasidic terms.”

That was the line I kept coming back to after the interview. He is a quant, meaning he trusts measurement, probability, and models. He is also a man who now openly talks about mission, Jewish purpose, and Hasidic thought. In his world, those things do not sit in separate rooms. He feeds one into the other. I actually tried this a bit after the interview. It was fascinating.

He told me he has written down his mission and tries to do things that “benefit the mission rather than benefit myself.” He even began answering my question about how invested he is in being Jewish by searching for a number.

That instinct, to quantify and then to step beyond quantification, runs through his public argument about Israel as well.

In a December essay, Tulchinsky wrote that Israel should evolve from a “Startup Nation” into a “Quant Nation" by treating data as a national asset, building shared forecasting tools, and running national stress tests across sectors from health to infrastructure and security. He argued that prediction is becoming infrastructure and that countries able to model uncertainty well will gain an edge.

In the studio, he put it more casually, but the point was the same.

Israel, he said, has the talent. What it lacks is a more developed quantitative finance culture and, more broadly, the institutional habit of building systems around prediction. He thinks the private sector is ahead of the public one. He also believes that opportunities are abundant.

“Everything is here for the potential,” he said.

That view now stretches beyond markets. At one point, when I jokingly told him I might as well use the interview as free consulting, I asked how he would bring AI into journalism.

His answer came fast. Agents can draft. Other agents can check. Then a human editor comes at the end.

He was careful at one point. Privacy still matters.

“You can’t put anything private on there that’s recognizable,” he said.

That warning matters for journalists, executives, and, really, anyone handling sensitive material while racing to move faster than the competition.

It also matters because Tulchinsky is not an AI evangelist in the empty sense of the word. He sounds like a power user with guardrails. He wants speed. He also wants reasoning. He believes models matter. He also knows models can fail.

That may be why he spoke about Israel with both admiration and caution.

He called it a country of “tremendous resilience” and “tremendous potential,” and also of “tremendous unity and tremendous disunity at the same time.” He spoke of some wartime developments as having worked out “almost miraculously" and referenced the Mossad operation in Lebanon and Syria in which pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded, killing and wounding militants, as one example of the kind of improbable success that shapes how outsiders view Israeli capability.

He was not suggesting magic. He was describing preparation so advanced that it can look miraculous from the outside.

That distinction matters to him. He is a man who built a fortune by searching for signals inside noise. Yet when the conversation turned personal, he did not retreat into the language of markets. He spoke about rabbis, hospitals, hostages, and a written mission. He spoke about being Jewish in ways that sounded lived rather than performative.

By the end, I asked him whether he has a dedicated AI chat for these religious framings, some special thread where the machine knows what to do.

No, he said. He simply asks.

And that may be the cleanest way to understand the strange, compelling fusion he represents right now: a billionaire quant who thinks Israel needs better models, who believes AI belongs in the newsroom, and who still wants the machine to explain the world back to him in Hasidic terms.