Top 200 Collectors

Very little in the way of detail is known about the specifics of the art collection of Brett and Daniel S. Sundheim, but the information that is available suggests that their interests in terms of buying art are geared toward the contemporary. But in February 2020, Bloomberg reported in that he had paid $28 million for a Warhol, $35 million for a Basquiat, and $70 million for a Twombly all using leverage, adding that Daniel, 42 at the time, is “part of a new breed of collectors who are eagerly pledging artworks in exchange for lines of credit and, in the process, leveraging the $67 billion art market as never before.” The article continued that he had built his collection by using a large credit line from JPMorgan Chase & Co., with 29 works held as collateral against $300 million worth of credit. (A spokesperson for Sundheim declined to comment, Bloomberg said.) 

Over the years they have provided major support to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, donating $3 million to the museum in 2018, which endowed the institution’s chief curator position. (Daniel is an alumnus of UPenn’s Wharton business school, and both Brett and Daniel have served on the ICA’s board.) The couple has also helped fund several high-profile exhibitions of contemporary work, including retrospectives of Jeff Koons at the Whitney Museum in 2014 and Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013, and are known patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Daniel is also a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2015 the Sundheims bought nearly the entire 15th floor of the Rosario Candela–designed building at 778 Park Avenue in New York for $28.5 million.

As the former chief investment officer of the hedge fund Viking Global Investors, Daniel helped oversee $32 billion in assets. He got his start at the company in 2002 as as an analyst and soon moved up to portfolio manager before becoming CIO, a role he held for seven years. After raising $4 billion in seed capital, he set out to establish his own fund, the New York–based D1 Capital Partners. The companies private investments have included Instacart and Juul, the e-cigarette manufacturer. According to Business Insider, D1 Capital Partners placed a short bet worth about $243 million against Adidas, whose stock was at a near six-month high.