David Alan Tepper (born September 11, 1957) is an American billionaire hedge fund manager. He is the owner of the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League (NFL) and Charlotte FC in Major League Soccer (MLS). Tepper is the founder and president of Appaloosa Management, a global hedge fund based in Miami Beach, Florida. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In 2013, he donated his largest gift of $67 million to Carnegie Mellon, whose Tepper School of Business is named after him. For the 2012 tax year, Institutional Investor's Alpha ranked Tepper's $2.2 billion paycheck as the world's highest for a hedge fund manager. He earned the third position on Forbes ''The Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers 2018'' with an annual earnings of $1.5 billion. A 2010 profile in New York described him as the object of "a certain amount of hero worship inside the industry," with one investor calling him "a golden god." Tepper revealed plans to eventually convert this hedge fund into a family office. Early life and education Tepper was born on September 11, 1957. He is the second of three children of Harry, an accountant, and Roberta, an elementary school teacher. He was raised in a Jewish family in the Stanton Heights neighborhood of the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a boy he “played football and memorized the baseball statistics on the backs of cards given to him by his grandfather—early evidence of what he claims is a photographic memory.” In a 2018 commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University, he revealed that his father had been physically abusive toward him. He attended Peabody High School in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood, followed by the University of Pittsburgh, helping pay his way by working at the Frick Fine Arts library. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and graduated with honors. He also began small scale investing in various markets during college. His first two investments, given to him by his father, were Pennsylvania Engineering Co. and Career Academies. Both companies went bankrupt. After graduation he entered the finance industry, working for Equibank as a credit analyst in the treasury department. In 1980, unsatisfied with this position, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University's business school to pursue its then-equivalent of an MBA, a Master of Science in Industrial Administration