charitable donations, including $15 million to the Center for Responsible Lending, $20 million to New York University Stern School of Business (auditorium now named after Paulson), $5 million to the Southampton Hospital on Long Island, $15 million to build a children's hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and £2.5 million to the London School of Economics for the John A. Paulson Chair in European Political Economy. In October 2012, Paulson donated $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that maintains New York City's Central Park. At the time of the donation, the gift represented the largest monetary donation in the history of New York City's park system. In June 2015, Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the largest gift received in the university's history. Following the donation, the engineering school was renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The next month, he gifted $8.5 million to New York City's largest charter school organization, Success Academy, to change public education and open up middle schools in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan. In 2022, New York University announced that Paulson had donated $100 million towards the cost of a new building in its Washington Square Campus. The building was named the John A. Paulson Center in recognition of the gift. Personal life In 2000, he married Jenny Zaharia, in an Episcopalian ceremony in Southampton, New York. Jenny was a Romanian immigrant who came to the United States after her brother George, a track star in Romania, defected and moved to Queens. They have two daughters, Giselle and Danielle, and live most of the year in a 28,500-square-foot Upper East Side townhouse on East 86th Street, obtained for $14.7 million in 2004. He also owns a home in Aspen purchased for $24.5 million in 2010 and an estate in Southampton that he bought for $41 million in 2008. Paulson has an older sister named Theodora Bar-El, an Israeli biologist. Paulson filed for divorce in September, 2021, but has withdrawn his divorce action so both sides can negotiate out of court and out of the media. See also The Big Short and The Big Short (film) recount many of the events described in Gregory Zuckerman's 2009 book The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and