The Fall and Redemption of Bill Miller, Once the Greatest Money Manager of Our Time
By
Andy Serwer
Follow
Aug 21, 2026, 1:30 am

Bill Miller in 2022: “I think I own more Amazon than any individual whose last name isn’t Bezos.”
“I used to be somebody, but now I am somebody else. “

—Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart

Regret and redemption, conscious or otherwise, can exert a powerful influence over our lives. I thought about this during a recent conversation with Bill Miller, the one-time legendary mutual fund manager.

“I’m blissfully retired,” he tells me on a call from Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. “Had I had a different life, maybe in the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, the optimal thing to do would have been to retire by age 55 instead of when I did.”

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

What Miller means is he should have quit before the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Hard to believe, but it’s been 20 years since the beginning of the GFC. By 2006, the housing market had started to decline and subprime mortgages in default were climbing. By that December, at least one subprime lender filed for bankruptcy. Soon it would get much worse, with economic demons savaging low-income homeowners and Wall Street swells alike.

Most licked their wounds and moved on, but for those close to the fire, like Miller, whose Legg Mason Value Trust was decimated in the crisis, the healing took longer. “I think his investing genius and record is deeply underappreciated because of the timing of his departure from the Value Trust,” says Chris Davis, chairman and portfolio manager of Davis Advisors.

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

So, what does Miller, now 76, make of things today? “When you’re in a bull market and close to all-time highs, there are always questions,” he says. “Today they relate to AI, socially, epistemologically, philosophically, and how much capital it’s drawing down.

“I got that new book, 1873, to refresh myself on the railroads and the panic of 1873,” he says. “It’s the time that most closely resembles now. You had a totally new technology that radically changed things and that required vast amounts of capital. Capital goes to experiments on different things, and eventually some of it actually works. Most of the internet stocks didn’t do very well, but a small number of them did fantastically well.”

Miller is best known for his fund beating the S&P 500 index 15 years in a row from 1991 to 2005. He was Money magazine’s Greatest Money Manager of the 1990s, Morningstar’s Fund Manager of the Decade, and a member of Barron’s All-Century Investment Team. I contributed to this canon, too, writing a profile of Miller in Fortune with the headline “The Greatest Money Manager of Our Time,” published in November 2006, just as his streak was about to end (gulp).

Newsletter Sign-up

The Barron's Daily

A morning briefing on what you need to know in the day ahead, including exclusive commentary from Barron's and MarketWatch writers.

Preview

Subscribed
His streak ending was hardly the worst of it, though. Miller then bet heavily on financial stocks like Bear Stearns and American International Group as they were tanking. In 2008, the Value Trust fund was down some 55%. “Every decision to buy anything has been wrong,” he told The Wall Street Journal at the time. “It’s been awful.” (Later he was portrayed unflatteringly, as Bruce Miller, in the 2015 movie The Big Short.) Miller stayed on as manager of Value Trust until 2012, and also ran the firm’s Opportunity Trust fund, but clearly he had hit his expiration date at Legg Mason and left in 2016, buying out half of a joint venture he had with the firm and setting up Miller Value Partners with his son Bill Miller IV and longtime colleague Samantha McLemore.

By the end of 2022, Miller the younger and McLemore were running MVP’s money, and the following year, Miller the elder sold each of them the parts of the business they ran. McLemore folded her piece into her company, Patient Capital Management, based in Baltimore, which now has some $3 billion in assets under management. Bill IV kept the MVP name (which has just under $500 million), added a couple of exchange-traded funds, and moved to Sarasota, Fla.

Miller probably doesn’t get enough credit for redefining value investing. Traditional value investors looked to orthodox metrics, price-to-book-value and price/earnings ratios, straight out of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis.

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

But Miller believes any stock could be considered a value stock if it traded at a discount to the present value of its future free cash flow. That steered him to tech companies like AOL and Dell Technologies, as well as Google, where he loaded up the truck during that company’s 2004 Dutch auction initial public offering, which vexed many on Wall Street. Over the years, Warren Buffett’s thinking about value investing has evolved closer to Miller’s.

Miller’s biggest home run has been Amazon.com. “Bill was highly criticized for not being a true value manager because he had invested in stocks like Amazon,” says McLemore. “I was in an investment club at Washington and Lee [McLemore’s and Miller’s alma mater] when he came to speak, and he pitched Amazon. He said we don’t know what real values are today because it depends on the future and the future is unknowable. But the best values don’t look cheap at the time because their prospects are good. Why would you ever exclude a class of companies that you know are the best values?”

“Amazon is my biggest position,” Miller tells me now. “I never sold it, only added to it. I think I own more Amazon than any individual whose last name isn’t Bezos, including a good deal more than [CEO] Andy Jassy or anybody else at Amazon.” Miller won’t say how much AMZN he owns but notes that Jassy owns 3.23 million shares worth about $834 million. (Little-known fact: Miller and Bezos both went to Miami Palmetto Senior High School.)

Miller’s second-biggest position is in Bitcoin, which he bought after hearing investor Wences Casares speak at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. “Wences recommended putting 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin, which I did when it was trading around $200 or $300. I wish I bought more.” Here, too, Miller won’t say how much he has, other than it is substantially more than 1% of his net worth. But if he bought $1 million of Bitcoin at $300, with the price now at $71,917, that would be worth $239 million.

“It took gold 5,000 years to get to $4,500, but Bitcoin made it to $71,000 in a few years,” he says. “Unlike gold, the supply of Bitcoin is fixed. Bitcoin may have no intrinsic value, but neither does a Honus Wagner baseball card or a Picasso.”

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

Miller owns a few stocks besides Amazon, such as biometric security company Clear Secure, where he had been on the board. (“I’m one of the larger owners. It’s still significantly underpriced.”) He also owns the neo-cloud company Nebius Group (“a fairly substantial position”). During the recent software-as-a-service apocalypse, Miller bought beaten-down private-equity firms’ stocks Apollo Global Management, KKR, and Ares Management, all of which had exposure to software (he calls it “buying into what I thought was an unrealistic panic—they’ve all rallied since then”), as well as Adobe (“just too cheap”) and digital design company Figma, which Adobe tried to buy.

Miller has a large position in McLemore’s Patient Capital, where he’s a senior advisor, whose biggest holdings are Royalty Pharma, which buys biopharmaceutical royalties, Google parent Alphabet, and UnitedHealth Group.

Miller also has money with his son, Bill Miller IV, 45, who in some ways is a chip off the old block—independent-minded, quietly gregarious, and baseball-loving. Miller IV is a Bitcoin fan, too, though unlike his dad, he favors the energy sector these days, including his largest position, Crescent Energy (“its free-cash-flow yield is not being reflected in its equity value”), and Chord Energy (“trades at a discount to book”). The younger Miller also likes Figure Technology Solutions, which uses blockchain technology for consumers to get home-equity lines of credit. “Not what you would call a traditional value name at 32 times earnings,” he says.

Another characteristic of Bill Miller senior is the unique form of intellectualism he brings to investing. An “ABD” (all but dissertation) in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, Miller will cite the likes of William James or John Dewey, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and Roman historian Tacitus. Miller, a former military intelligence officer, found a common ground between philosophy and markets at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a brainiac think tank which studies complexity. He was board chair there, where he has kicked around ideas with Nobel Prize winners, as well as the late author Cormac McCarthy.

Besides supporting SFI, Miller has given $125 million to the philosophy, physics, and astronomy departments at Johns Hopkins, where he was on the board, as is his second wife, Heather Hay Miller, who was a notable consumer products analyst at Merrill Lynch decades ago. In 2024, Miller gave Washington and Lee $132 million, allowing the university to go needs-blind in its admissions.

And Miller is a minority owner of the Baltimore Orioles. “I waste three hours almost every night or day that the Orioles are playing, watching them play .500 ball. I consider that almost a charitable or philanthropic thing right now.”

Advertisement - Scroll to Continue

For sure, Miller has been wrong sometimes. Besides the GFC debacle, he stubbed his toe on Eastman Kodak and Enron. But he has made some epic calls, too. In an April 2023 interview, Miller said he believed Amazon’s stock would double in three years. It did and then some, from $102 to $249 in April of this year. Today Amazon trades at $261.

No regrets there.

Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com. Follow him on X and subscribe to his At Barron’s podcast.