His family fled the Soviet Union with 1 ruble to their name. Now billionaire Igor Tulchinsky is backing the biggest European exhibition of 2026

Igor Tulchinsky likes a story with some risk in it. His own starts in the Soviet Union, in what is now Belarus, where his family left when he was 11 after being allowed out with just 1 ruble. By his telling, his father spent it on gum at the border. That kind of exit, he says, changes how you think about danger and reward for the rest of your life.

Today Tulchinsky is best known for something far more modern: algorithmic trading. He founded WorldQuant, the hedge fund spun out from Millennium, and he says artificial intelligence is already reshaping the business. He thinks it will soon drive a 100-fold jump in productivity at the firm. WorldQuant is also pouring money into turning messy financial data into something usable.

So his latest gift looks, at first glance, like a sharp turn away from all that. Tulchinsky has given £5m to the British Museum for its Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, which opened this month in London. The show is already sold out until the end of the year after more than 65,000 people queued online for tickets. More than 1 million visitors are expected to see the 70-meter embroidery, which is being shown in the U.K. for the first time.

He sees the point immediately. The tapestry, which tells the story of the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, is both ancient and physical, and that matters to him in an age of screens, feeds and large language models. Tulchinsky argues that people need longer attention spans, broader thinking and real skills if they’re going to keep up with AI. His WorldQuant Foundation backs WorldQuant University, which offers free online programs in financial engineering and applied AI, and he frames the museum donation the same way: not as charity that disappears, but as an investment in what lasts.

There’s a neat symmetry here. A man made rich by code is paying to keep people in front of thread and wool. That’s a better use of billionaire money than another glossy slogan about the future. The future is crowded enough already; the past still has room to teach.