Billionaire Igor Tulchinsky funds Bayeux Tapestry loan to British Museum amid Israel ties controversy

The Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-meter embroidered cloth depicting the Battle of Hastings, will be exhibited at the British Museum in London from September 10, 2026 to July 11, 2027. The first batch of tickets sold out immediately. The loan was made possible by a £5 million contribution from billionaire Igor Tulchinsky, founder of quantitative hedge fund WorldQuant. Tulchinsky, born in Belarus in 1966 and based in the US, has a net worth of nearly €2 billion. His firm WorldQuant, spun off from Millennium Management in 2007, manages $10 billion. Tulchinsky also funds the WorldQuant University and chess tournaments. In 2023, he paid for Israeli hostage families to travel to Washington to lobby Congress. The British Museum recently faced controversy when UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLIF) successfully pressured the museum to remove the word "Palestine" from all informational panels, prompting criticism from the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB) as an act of historical erasure.