He spent 21 years as an options trader before writing about uncertainty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb was born in 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon, to a Greek Orthodox family with roots in the country's political and intellectual life.1 The Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975, displaced his family. Taleb later described the experience of watching a seemingly stable country collapse overnight as foundational to his understanding of risk and fragility.
Taleb earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in management science from the University of Paris. He worked as a derivatives trader and risk analyst for 21 years at institutions including Credit Suisse First Boston and BNP Paribas before turning to full-time writing and scholarship.2
His 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable argued that the most consequential events in history, markets, and life are precisely those that are unpredicted, unpredictable, and retrospectively rationalized.3
In 2012, Taleb published Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, which introduced the concept of antifragility, a property of systems that not only resist shocks but grow stronger from them. He distinguished antifragile systems from merely robust ones, arguing that most institutions are designed for fragility by suppressing small stressors that would otherwise build resilience.4
Taleb holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. His five-volume philosophical essay series, the Incerto, includes Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007), The Bed of Procrustes (2010), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).5