Mr. David Tepper, 50, is a speculator, investor, and highly successful hedge fund manager of Appaloosa Management. His investment specialty is companies in bad shape. He is married and lives with three children in Chatham, New Jersey, US. He studied in Peabody High School in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from there in 1975. After that, he attended the University of Pittsburgh, and earned a bachelor of arts with honors in economics in 1978. Upon graduation, he set foot in the finance industry by joining Equibank as a credit analyst in the treasury department. Not happy with his position, he enrolled in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University Business School in 1980. After earning his MBA in 1982, Mr. Tepper accepted a position in the treasury department of Republic Steel in Ohio.

As president and founder of Appaloosa Management, he is now renowned for producing some of the highest returns amongst fund managers in the business. In 1984, he joined Keystone Mutual Funds (now part of Evergreen Funds) in Boston, and in 1985, he was recruited by Goldman Sachs, when the company was in the process of setting up its high yield group. He joined Goldman Sachs in the capacity of a credit analyst. Soon he became the head trader on the high-yield desk at Goldman and worked there for eight years before leaving the company in December 1992. Soon after, Mr. Tepper started Appaloosa Management in 1993. It is a $3 billion hedge fund investment established with Jack Walton, a former senior portfolio manager for Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The firm is a general partner of Appaloosa Investment Limited Partnership I and invests in debt and equity securities on behalf of individuals, foundations, universities and other organizations. It also advises Palomino Fund, Ltd. In one of his philanthropist gestures, he donated $55 million for Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business.