Humility is not a typical posture for a hedge fund titan, but David Tepper, the founder of the $20 billion Appaloosa Management, wants you to know he has made mistakes and is fixing them.
Mr. Tepper is not talking about positions on tech stocks that went south or wrong-way bets on a foreign currency. He is referring to the Carolina Panthers, the National Football League team he bought in 2018 for a record $2.3 billion.
The Panthers have been one of the worst teams in the league since he took over, winning just 33 percent of their games and never making the playoffs. Mr. Tepper has churned through seven coaches and 10 quarterbacks, sparred with reporters and been fined $300,000 for throwing a drink at a fan. He also shelved the construction of a team facility after a bitter dispute with officials in South Carolina.
Eight seasons into his tenure in one of America’s most exclusive clubs, Mr. Tepper is contrite and confident that he has finally found a winning formula. He hired new coaches and a general manager who rebuilt the roster, and used his deep pockets — he is the second-wealthiest N.F.L. owner, with a net worth of $24 billion, according to Forbes — to expand the team’s analytics department, renovate its stadium and build a new training facility.
His efforts are paying off this season: The Panthers are off to a surprising 6-5 start, a half-game out of first place in their four-team division, and surpassing the number of wins they had in their 17-game season last year.
“You really know you’re successful when you know what you don’t know,” Mr. Tepper said in a rare interview at the team’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C. He pointed to his cellphone as a proxy for his hedge fund. “I think that in that thing, I’m pretty fast. I’m early to see things, early to see when I’m wrong. It’s just a question of getting the right cadence. This is a little bit different because the cadence is a little different.”
The Panthers’ poor performance has made Mr. Tepper unpopular with football fans in the Carolinas, a reminder that money doesn’t buy success and that restraint is sometimes more important than speed.
“Dave, as a person who’s a trader, wants to move very quickly on things, and that’s how he’s been successful,” said Marc Ganis, a consultant to N.F.L. teams. “He is a very aggressive fellow, incredibly smart, and patience is something that you learn as a team owner.”
Mr. Tepper, gregarious and self-assured, is the latest billionaire owner to be humbled. Now 68, he is one of the country’s most successful hedge fund managers. His fund has produced gross annualized returns of more than 28 percent, on average, since its inception in 1993, according to Institutional Investor. A former junk bond trader at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Tepper takes contrarian bets on distressed debt and other high-risk investments.
But N.F.L. franchises are not distressed assets, given that they rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from the league’s lucrative media deals every year. Yet owners can’t control the action on the field, including player injuries that can derail the most promising seasons.
Mr. Tepper has had success with Charlotte F.C., the Major League Soccer expansion club he bought, which began play in 2022 and made the playoffs for the first time this season. And since 2018, he said, the Panthers have “become a Nasdaq stock,” nearly tripling in value, to $6.4 billion. He compared buying the Panthers to “a T-bill type investment, like Treasuries,” anticipating steady growth.
“I have a knack for catching pretty good investments,” he said.
Mr. Tepper is bullish about the N.F.L.’s prospects. He described how he expected broadcasters to use artificial intelligence to sell ads targeted to viewers’ tastes. The league will be able to charge more for its broadcasting rights, he said, once it figures out how much more sponsors are willing to pay for those ads.
His musings were typical of a man straddling two worlds. Most N.F.L. owners have their hands full running their increasingly complex multibillion-dollar teams. Mr. Tepper, though, remains intensely involved in his hedge fund. He wakes up early every weekday to catch up on the overnight news, and sets aside an hour when the markets open and another when they close to monitor his fund’s portfolio.
Dan Morgan, the team’s general manager since 2024, recalled sitting across from Mr. Tepper at his desk. As they discussed the fate of the team, a screen behind Mr. Morgan set to CNBC flashed news.
Mr. Tepper quickly called his traders at Appaloosa, barked a few orders, hung up and resumed the conversation without missing a beat. Mr. Morgan never found out what had caught Mr. Tepper’s eye or how the trade worked out, but he was astonished at how quickly his boss could toggle between the two businesses.
“I don’t know how he does all that,” said Mr. Morgan, who played seven seasons for the Panthers. “Whatever he saw, it was just crazy.”
Mr. Tepper keeps a hectic schedule, jetting between his office in New Jersey, his teams in Charlotte, and Florida, where his mother lives.
Mr. Tepper denied rumors that he meddled in team decisions, and Mr. Morgan said that although they often talked, he himself made the day-to-day decisions. Mr. Tepper said his own skill lay in determining a player’s financial value, a necessity in a league with a cap on team payrolls.
He said one reason for the Panthers’ slow start on his watch was that he had inherited a roster filled with aging veterans with big contracts, and that it had taken several years to shed those obligations. Then he hired Matt Rhule, a college coach, who was hamstrung trying to run the team during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Rhule won just 11 games before he was fired during his third season.
The Panthers thought they landed a franchise quarterback when they drafted Bryce Young in 2023, but he has struggled, too, leading Mr. Tepper to declare 2025 the player’s make-or-break year. If he does not progress, the team may look for a replacement, which could set back the rebuilding.
“We’ve got to be real about what we are,” Mr. Tepper said. The Panthers might make the postseason, he added, “but we’re not a playoff team.”
By the N.F.L.’s buttoned-up standards, Mr. Tepper is refreshingly candid, cracking jokes and dropping obscenities while offering views on football and the stock market. He emphasizes his middle-class roots in Pittsburgh, where his father was an accountant and his mother taught elementary school. By his own admission, he wasn’t a good student and cut class with friends to eat pancakes at a soup kitchen. He played football — including in a cemetery — and was a running back in high school. He worked as a short-order cook and loaded trucks at a bakery.
But Mr. Tepper was good with numbers. He memorized baseball statistics and traded stock options in college.
After finishing his undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Pittsburgh, he worked as a credit analyst, then earned a master’s in business at Carnegie Mellon. Mr. Tepper failed in his first attempt to join Goldman Sachs, so he joined Republic Steel, a steel maker that he helped avoid bankruptcy.
With experience at a distressed company, he was recruited by Goldman to work in the bank’s high-yield division. He quickly became the head trader in its still-nascent business of trading junk bonds, those of heavily indebted companies.
One hedge fund manager who traded with him when Mr. Tepper was at Goldman and later at Appaloosa said Mr. Tepper had been willing to jump in and buy bonds in huge amounts when others panicked. From there, he moved in and out of positions so quickly that he made triple what others would on similar trades.
As Mr. Tepper’s reputation among junk bond traders grew, other firms looked to see what positions he might be buying in size and tried to follow him. The hedge fund manager said Mr. Tepper knew how to outmaneuver those who were following his trades, selling an investment at one price and quickly buying it back for less.
Some former Wall Street colleagues and trading partners said they saw parallels between Mr. Tepper’s firing of multiple Panthers coaches and his rapid-fire style of trading. When he lost conviction in an idea, he had no problem selling everything immediately and moving on.
Mr. Tepper quickly became known as one of the top moneymakers at Goldman but was passed over twice for a coveted spot as partner.
In a commencement address at Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Tepper said it was because of a series of trades that he deemed unethical and refused to execute. Others at Goldman said that while his moneymaking abilities had often awed his supervisors, his brazenness had failed to endear him to many of them.
Lloyd Blankfein, who was Mr. Tepper’s peer at the bank before becoming its chief executive, said that “it was a real loss for Goldman when he left” to start Appaloosa.
“If he stayed at Goldman, he wouldn’t be walking the sidelines as an owner,” Mr. Blankfein said. “He’d be going on StubHub trying to scalp tickets like the rest of us.”
By most accounts, Mr. Tepper has been a team player in N.F.L. circles. He bought 5 percent of the Steelers in 2009, and later increased his share to 10 percent. This gave him an inside look at owning a team and the implicit endorsement of Art Rooney II, the Steelers owner, when the Panthers were for sale in 2018. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Tepper had the cash to buy the team outright.
Mr. Tepper, who has little trouble expressing his opinions, was initially quiet in owners’ meetings. After seven full years, he has found his voice, particularly on the league’s finance and venture capital fund committees.
“We hear from him a little more often now,” Mr. Rooney said. “He’s a smart guy and always has an observation on what’s going on.”
Mr. Tepper has a mixed reputation with fans, though. Soccer fans love him because Charlotte F.C. has steadily improved under his ownership and draws more than 30,000 fans for matches.
He has had a rockier relationship with Panthers fans. The team still draws well, but the years of losing have been frustrating. Mr. Tepper is preaching patience, but fans remain skeptical, a reminder that it’s hard to change public perception.
“There’s no one else to look to at this point” to explain the losing, said Jessica Womack, a longtime fan who lives in Charlotte. “This is Season 8 and he hasn’t had a winning season, which is ironic because I’ve seen his hedge fund.”
Ken Belson is a Times reporter covering sports, power and money at the N.F.L. and other professional sports leagues.
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