Thomas Faust

Thomas E. Faust Jr. was born in 1958 in Helena, Arkansas, where his family ran the Faust Band Saw Mill, a hardwood sawmill founded by his grandfather in 1934. He graduated first in his high school class and was named a Presidential Scholar and Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation National Merit Scholar. He earned B.S. degrees in mechanical engineering and economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1981) and an MBA from Harvard Business School (1985). He has been a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) since 1988. Before entering asset management, he worked roughly two years as a research engineer at International Paper Company.

Faust joined Boston-based Eaton Vance Corp. in 1985, when the firm managed approximately $3.5 billion in assets and had an equity market value near $55 million. Over the next 16 years in the firm's equity group he served as equity research analyst, portfolio manager, director of equity research, and chief equity investment officer. He was elected a vice president in 1987, executive vice president in 2000, chief investment officer in November 2001, and president in 2006.

On November 1, 2007, Faust became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Eaton Vance, leading the firm through the 2008–09 financial crisis and a long expansion in which assets under management grew to more than $600 billion. Under his leadership Eaton Vance became one of the largest and most respected independent asset managers in the U.S., and its stock reportedly ranked in the top few percent of U.S. public companies over his tenure.

In October 2020, Morgan Stanley agreed to acquire Eaton Vance for roughly $7 billion (approximately $9+ billion in total transaction value including net cash), a deal described as among the highest prices ever paid for a publicly held asset manager. The acquisition closed on March 1, 2021, after which Faust became Chairman of Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) and a member of the MSIM Operating Committee and the Morgan Stanley Management Committee. Outside the firm, he has served on the board of governors of the Investment Company Institute, as a trustee and executive-committee member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and as a trustee (later trustee emeritus) of Wellesley College. He was inducted into the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame.

• Discipline is public-markets asset management, not venture/angel investing. Faust's career has been about running and growing a diversified institutional/retail investment manager, not writing checks into early-stage startups.
• Core strategy areas at Eaton Vance/MSIM span equities, fixed income, floating-rate bank loans, municipal bonds, and responsible/ESG investing.
• Long-standing emphasis on investment innovation and franchise-building — under his leadership Eaton Vance built or scaled specialist affiliates (Parametric custom/tax-managed and "direct indexing" strategies, Calvert responsible investing, Atlanta Capital) and pioneered structural product innovation such as NextShares exchange-traded managed funds.
• Strategic emphasis on responsible investing (ESG) and customized/parametric solutions as growth engines, which were central to Morgan Stanley's rationale for the acquisition.