Last year, when the great investor George Soros retired, at 70, from his career of speculating with billions of other people’s dollars, it was as if a legendary athlete — his fingers covered with championship rings — had grudgingly given up after a couple of humiliating losing seasons. Soros’ lifetime record was astonishing: If you had invested $1,000 in his Quantum Fund when he started out in 1969, he would have turned your paltry grand into $4 million by the new millennium — a cumulative 32 percent annual return, the financial equivalent of a major-league slugger batting .400 not just for a single season but for three decades.

Like John D. Rockefeller in a previous generation, Soros found making his billions to be very stressful, and he took much more pleasure in giving them away. Even though he has already given $2.8 billion to his foundation, Soros is still worth around $5 billion. He has promised to give away the rest of his wealth before he turns 80, meaning that his legacy as a philanthropist and reformer could be even greater than it already is.

Soros achieved his lasting fame early on: Back in 1981 he was hailed as “the world’s greatest money manager” by the bible of the trade, Institutional Investor, which wrote: “As Borg is to tennis, Jack Nicholas is to golf and Fred Astaire is to tap dancing, so is George Soros to money management.”

Only one other individual — the famed Warren Buffett — rivaled Soros as an investing wizard for the long stretch from the ’60s through the ’90s. Buffett’s approach was dreadfully prosaic — he lived in Omaha, Neb., of all places, bought stocks in a few supersolid companies (among them Coca-Cola, Disney, ABC and the Washington Post) and held onto them forever. Soros, in contrast, was the epitome of guts and glory. He was a short-term speculator who made terrifyingly huge bets on the directions of financial markets.

No wager was bigger than the time in September 1992 when he risked $10 billion — billion with a B — that the British pound would fall. His instinct was right: That night, while Soros slept in his apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he made $1 billion from the trade. Ultimately his profit reached almost $2 billion — and earned him international notoriety.

From that point on, Soros had guru status among traders, who believed that he could move markets single-handedly. Presidents and prime ministers constantly feared that Soros would bet against their currencies, and the sheeplike denizens of Wall Street and London’s City would follow him, resulting in sharp devaluations and economic crises. Malaysia’s chief of state demonized him for allegedly ruining that country’s economy during the Asian financial panic. Soros gained a reputation as one of the few names — along with Buffett and Alan Greenspan — that had oracular status in the global economy.

And then it all went to hell. Soros lost $2 billion in Russia’s default in 1998. The following year he made a big bet that Internet stocks would fall. The basic idea was right, but he was about a year too early, and he quickly lost $700 million. Then he rushed to buy up a bunch of tech stocks, which sank. His embarrassing losses mounted to almost $3 billion when the NASDAQ ultimately did crash in the spring of 2000. That’s when Soros announced that he was withdrawing from an active role at Quantum, which he would transform from a high-risk speculative fund into a conservative institution — a move like Babe Ruth pledging that he would only try to hit singles from now on.

Soros wasn’t the only legend who suffered an embarrassing fall. Another famous speculator, Julian Robertson — who managed money for New York glitterati such as writer Tom Wolfe — lost billions and had to close down his Tiger Fund last year. Even Buffett had a bad slump. For the small-time day trader at home, moaning as he watched CNBC and logged on to E-Trade and figured that he had just blown the kids’ college tuition fund, it was oddly comforting. It was like watching Tiger Woods triple-bogey every hole on the back nine. If even he could be such a duffer, then you had an excuse.

But even as Soros retired from Wall Street, his influence in the world had never been greater. For two decades his true passions had been philanthropy and political influence, not investing, and by 2001 he had put a stunning $2.8 billion into his foundation, which promotes liberal democracy throughout the globe. Since 1980, when he began giving financial support to dissidents and human-rights movements such as Poland’s Solidarity, no private citizen has done more to promote reform in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Newsweek called him “a one-man Marshall Plan.”

In the ’90s Soros expanded his efforts to Africa, Latin America and even the United States, where the paragon of capitalism became a cult hero to the bohemian counterculture for his outspoken criticism of the drug war and his financial largess for groups advocating drug legalization and medical marijuana ballot initiatives. Although the $30 million he has given toward changing drug policy is a mere crumb of his overall philanthropy, it has helped to remake his image in this country from capitalist kingpin to progressive savior. While Buffett is famous for sipping Cherry Coke, Soros — who doesn’t smoke tobacco, let alone pot — is most celebrated for fostering cannabis clubs.

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Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 as Dzjcgdzhe Shorash and grew up in a family of haute bourgeoisie Hungarian Jews. His father, Tivadar, was an attorney who worked very little, preferring the pursuits of a bon vivant. He owned real estate and published an Esperanto journal. Tivadar’s life of comfort and leisure, made possible in part by a good marriage, came after a perilous youth. He was a lieutenant in World War I when he was taken as prisoner of war on the Russian front and exiled to Siberia. He escaped and lived as a fugitive through the tumult of the Russian Revolution.

Those survival skills were crucial to the family when the fascists invaded in World War II. Tivadar bribed government officials for false identity papers so his son could pretend to be the godson of a gentile bureaucrat. For a period, the family hid from the Nazis in nearly a dozen different attics and concealed stone cellars.

After the war the teenage Soros moved to England (he was inspired by BBC broadcasts) and scrounged odd jobs. As a waiter at Quaglino’s, a posh restaurant in London, he wasn’t too ashamed to scavenge the leftover profiteroles. In 1948, at age 18, he supported himself by harvesting apples and painting houses before enrolling at the London School of Economics.

Soros was strongly influenced by one of his professors there, Karl Popper, author of “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” At a time when leftist intellectuals still had faith in the Marxist religion, Popper argued that Communism was as condemnable as fascism, since both were repressive and intolerant. Popper’s ideas resonated with the young Soros, who had lived under the Nazi and Soviet occupations and had seen both regimes firsthand. Decades later, Popper’s conception of the “open society” would be the basis for Soros’ philanthropic efforts — he would even borrow the term for the title of one of his own books.

Soros aspired to be an intellectual luminary like Popper, but his grades weren’t top-notch and he had to struggle for his subsistence. During one break from school he did a stint as a night-shift railway porter. In 1952, after receiving his degree, he worked as a handbag salesman before finally getting in the door at a London investment bank. Four years later he moved to New York with only $5,000.