Opera Fan Vilar Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is

Alberto Vilar is a man of many names.

His father called him a “longhair.” He calls himself a nerd. He’s also a visionary who had the foresight to invest in semiconductors 20 years ago. And now, he is being called a philanthropist for giving away millions.

Vilar is founder and president of Amerindo Investment Advisors--a billion-dollar investment-advisory firm that gains and loses millions of dollars in a heartbeat. In fact, it costs $10 million just to sign up.

Vilar schedules his life around opera, skiing and work. He sees more than 100 operas a year in New York, Salzburg and Vienna, Austria, and Vail, Colo., and is such a devoted fan that he gave the Metropolitan Opera $25 million.

“I believe the Met is a unique institution. I believe it’s the best opera company in the world,” said Vilar, also a member of the Met’s board. “I vote to keep that alive.”

The Met, in return, is naming its grand tier after Vilar.

Vilar’s life as a jet-setting philanthropist didn’t seem in the offing when he was a boy. Born in New Jersey, he spent his first nine years in Cuba, then moved to Puerto Rico, the home of his mother. His father was in the Cuban sugar business and the family lost its wealth following the Cuban revolution.

A quiet boy, Vilar was raised by his grandmother and at 10 he discovered his music gene. It wasn’t the Caribbean music around him that he loved, it was European classical music.

“I have but so many music cells in my brain,” Vilar said, wearing a tie adorned with musical instruments and sitting in his apartment at the edge of a glass-topped table etched to resemble a lute.

Of his father’s calling him a longhair, Vilar said, “That’s the worst thing a father could call you. I wanted to study the violin, then I wanted to conduct. I didn’t get to opera till I was an old man in my 20s.”

Now, “I know opera so well I’m not just following it, I’m thinking” about other things, Vilar said. “I find this mentally soothing.”

His apartment high above the streets near the United Nations is a museum to European art and a shrine to opera. The walls are decorated with Postimpressionist paintings. Over his glass dining room table are Met lights--the same chandeliers that rise to the ceiling at the opera. In a corner is a tall, black bronze statue of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” There are two statues of Mozart himself.

Vilar moved to the United States after he finished high school in Puerto Rico.

“I’m here because I’m not there,” Vilar said, comparing his achievements with this physical location. “I would have had trouble if I had stayed on either island . . . . They just don’t have the same resources.”

In college, his life resembled his routine back in Puerto Rico--room-bound, listening to European classical music, a self-described nerd.

“I was always a socially shy person. I was perfectly happy to read, study, listen to music,” he said. “I didn’t know sonata this or sonata that, but you could play one of the great 50 pieces and I could identify them.”

He attended Washington and Jefferson University in Washington, Penn., and pledged $5 million to his alma mater last May to create the Vilar Center for Technology.

After graduating, he spent two years in Germany in the Army building his record collection and finding a Grundig stereo, the tops of its generation.

Back in the United States in 1964, Vilar’s father told him it was clear Fidel Castro would be assassinated and, since banks finance the sugar business, Vilar should become a banker.

Vilar was an international credit officer with Citibank and was sent to Colombia. He then ventured onto Wall Street in 1967 with Burnham & Co., where he was a portfolio manager and analyst before the firm morphed into the junk bond king Drexel Burnham Lambert.

In Boston in the 1970s at a firm that later became ING Barings, Vilar saw the future and it was semiconductors.

“I got something right that others didn’t,” Vilar said. “I looked at this and said this could be something huge.”

In 1979, Vilar founded Amerindo Investment Advisors, just as the high-tech revolution got underway.

“It was the right thing to do. We pioneered the management of emerging growth portfolios,” Vilar said. “We became very quickly big investors in Microsoft, Compaq, you name it, Intel, Oracle, Cisco.”

Amerindo at first had accounts of $250,000 that now are worth $10 million.

“It was a hard sell. Today you could sit down with your grandmother and she’d understand Microsoft,” Vilar said. But it was different then. “We deserve the accolades.”

Vilar made his first $2 million within two years. He declined to say what he’s worth now.

“I thought if you made $2 million you were on top of the mountain and could rest,” Vilar said. “The bigger goal was not to make money but to create a good company.”

Technology may be the future, but its stocks bring on palpitations. Amerindo started a technology fund in October 1996 that lost 50% within six months. It’s recouped 37% in the past year.

The rest is all downhill, down a ski hill, that is. Vilar took up skiing in his late 40s with the same intensity he gives music.

“He loves to go down mountains at breakneck speed,” said James W. Kinnear, the Met’s chairman and a former Texaco chief executive. “One stretches the soul, the other stretches your arms and legs. They are each daring in their own way.”

Two years ago in a skiing accident, Vilar shattered his left elbow and lower arm, the beginning of multiple surgeries at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

Vilar liked the treatment and is giving $4.1 million to the hospital, which is creating the Alberto Vilar Center for Hand and Upper Extremity Research.

“I never thought about philanthropy until I was in my 40s,” admits Vilar, who turned 58 on Oct. 4.

He began by sponsoring students to college, and continues to do so. He also funds opera productions, some at $1 million plus. He has also committed $10 million to the Vilar Center for the Arts in Vail.

Vilar saw 27 operas this past summer and wants to return to skiing this winter.

“It works for me because I don’t have any kiddies,” said Vilar, who is divorced. “I get faxes all day, I work all day and then I see operas in the evening.”