[10] Kovner spent his early years in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn with his parents and three siblings before the family relocated to suburban Los Angeles in 1953.
[13] Kovner went to Harvard College starting in 1962, a time marred by the hanging suicide of his mother back in his family's Van Nuys home in 1965.
Kovner stayed at Harvard, studying political economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, notably under prominent conservative scholar Edward C. Banfield.
Over the next few years, he engaged in a number of eclectic efforts; he worked on political campaigns, studied the harpsichord, was a writer, and a cab driver.
In January 2012 he donated around $500,000 to Restore our Future, a Super PAC supporting the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.
His close acquaintances have included former Vice President Dick Cheney,[11] neoconservative figures Richard Perle and James Q. Wilson.
[26] The paper was criticized in The Guardian since the majority of organizations in the study have multiple focuses, and Brulle could not say what portion of money (if any) was devoted to climate issues.
[27] Other philanthropic causes he has supported include the Institute for Justice,[28] a public interest law firm that focuses on school choice; the Innocence Project[29] and Centurion Ministries,[30] which help serve wrongly-convicted inmates, and Lambda Legal,[31] which advocates for equality and civil rights for the LGBTQ community.
[2][32][33] His Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City, the Willard D. Straight House, features a lead-lined room to protect against a chemical, biological, or dirty bomb attack.
[11] In 2008, he was inducted into the Institutional Investor's Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame along with Alfred Jones, David Swensen, George Soros, Jack Nash, James Simons, Julian Roberston, Kenneth Griffin, Leon Levy, Louis Bacon, Michael Steinhardt, Paul Tudor Jones, Seth Klarman and Steven A.
[34] Kovner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[35] and received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from The Juilliard School.