#Bill Hwang had been eyeing $100B club before blow up: sources

Before he was known as the guy behind billions in losses on Wall Street, Bill Hwang had been aiming to join the rarified air of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates by becoming a member of the $100 billion dollar club, sources said.

Prior to the collapse of his family office, Archegos Capital, in March, Hwang had increased his personal wealth from around $200 million in 2013 to more than $20 billion. That’s a 4,900 percent increase in less than 8 years.

Given the pace at which Hwang was building his personal wealth, talk around the office at Archegos Capital, including from Hwang himself, was that the Julian Robertson protégé was well on his way to making the leap from $10 billion club to $100 billion club in two to three more years, sources said.

Doing so would represent just a 900 percent increase in wealth, said a source who added that Hwang’s epic rise had staffers believing he could easily become one of the 10 wealthiest people on the planet.

In a statement to The Post, an Archegos spokesperson said, “Bill Hwang would never think like that, much less make the statement.”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates was the first person to reach the vaunted $100 billion threshold in 1999, followed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2017. Currently, more than nine people claim the title including LVMH Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault, Tesla founder Elon Musk, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Critics, however, note that Hwang’s fast-and-furious ascent was riddled with warning signs.

“When you see someone hit it out of the park the way Hwang had, the law of time and numbers suggests it won’t continue,” Chris Whalen, chairman of research firm Whalen Global Advisors said. “As a risk manager, the first thing you say to yourself when you see someone hit alpha up the wazoo is they’re not going to do that again.”