You don't know what you are talking about, so you are not in a position to know if he is lying. It's unclear who would qualify as a "portfolio manager" at Renaissance: That's just not a title there. I don't know why you think the number of PhD employees is not what has been reported. Nearly all the researchers are PhDs, and so are many of the programmers. I think 100 is probably not far off.
And I don't know MRNA? https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/mrna-getting-more-money.347454/#post-5154799
They are doing the same thing i do. Back test models. And 100% automation no overriding (but sometime i fail at that ) I estimate my capacity is only 3 million in profits a year at most, maybe not even that. But if they make say 30% on 10 billion these days. Thats $30 million profit per Phd. Or $10 million per employee. Also because i have only 2 underlying models, my sharpe is not going to be as good theirs, im going to have long losing periods. Sometime losing years. If i had more uncorrelated predictive models i could have a smoother curve. What is the sharpe ratio of Medallion. Around, 3.0? Maybe a bit higher Given that how many different models they likely have, its not that high, although most likely if they traded smaller size they would have much better sharpe. But they increase size which drops the sharpe down but still to a level that is world beating.
Probably seen it 3x to listen for keywords. + other interviews connected to this company or people. In this video he basically said statistics is enough for finance prediction. I got hooked to the idea years ago started developing and it's not far from truth. Now listening again it gives new dimensions to this talk.
Interview with author of the book 'The Man Who Solved the Market', he got about 10 hours face time to Jim Simons when he wrote the book. Although Simons didnt give away secrets he did also interview lots of other people for the book. I have queued to the 37 minute mark where the Author talks about his understanding of what Medalion does. He mentions they have a database of everykind of data that could effect (equity) markets, eg weather patterns, shipping data... From this guys book: Medalian was up 105 Billion since launch till end of 2018. 80 Billion of that was made since 2007
If same team would have worked on climate model instead. Weather prediction models would probably be more accurate by now. But knowing human nature for what it is , it all makes sense.