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CalPERS is betting Gilmore can replicate the success he had in New Zealand with a fund that has more than 10 times the assets. There’s a lot riding on the experiment. Failure to meet its 6.8% return target increases the burden on California’s local governments to make up the difference—money that could be used for affordable housing, hiring more teachers or boosting health services. That puts CalPERS managers under a harsh spotlight. “It’s a very hard job, a very public job,” says Theresa Taylor, president of the CalPERS board.
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Gilmore’s predecessor as permanent CIO, Nicole Musicco, resigned after less than two years on the job, saying she needed to spend more time with her family in Toronto. The Canadian executive got some pushback internally on her focus on sports, technology and venture capital investments, Bloomberg reported at the time.
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Before Musicco, CIO Ben Meng chose to resign after state officials opened a review into whether he’d violated conflict-of-interest rules. Meng had disclosed his own investments and relied on CalPERS to flag potential conflicts, according to documents, and there was no evidence he sought personal gain. He agreed to pay a $10,000 fine in 2024 to resolve the issue. While managing the fund, he faced criticism for ending a hedging program in the weeks leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic; the decision cost the fund more than $1 billion in forgone payments. Meng said in a public meeting that the program was costly and that the fund’s other risk controls cut losses by $11 billion.
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Margaret Brown, a former CalPERS board member and a vocal critic, says management churn at the top contributed to the fund’s poor performance. “When you don’t have continuity at the top, it’s hard to set a course,” she says. “With every new leadership team, we’ve gone in a different direction.”
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A group headed by Brown commissioned a report that slams the fund’s investment practices, pinning “chronic underperformance” on a lack of transparency, fees paid to outside money managers and a range of other issues. A shift over the years toward opaque alternative assets such as private equity, private credit and real estate has been especially costly, according to the report, which recommends appointing an independent inspector general.
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CalPERS’ Frost calls the report an “opinion piece full of baseless assertions and breathless language.” For the past two years, she says, CalPERS ranked in the top 5% of large US pension funds by performance, helped by its private equity portfolio. She also says the fund has cut fees as a percentage of total private equity investment since 2024.
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Gilmore says he knows the high stakes of running the fund. “In the end you must focus on the job at hand and not be distracted by some of the unwelcome headlines,” he says.
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The man responsible for investing one of the largest pools of capital in the world doesn’t own a car in the US. Gilmore, who earned $2.3 million last year, walks about a mile to his CalPERS office from his home in downtown Sacramento. He spends free time checking out rock bands (guitarist Jack White is a favorite), loves a good craft brewery and vacations at his hut on a New Zealand mountain pass, fishing for brown trout.
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Gilmore grew up in a seaside suburb of Christchurch, the biggest city on New Zealand’s South Island. His father worked as a crane operator at the city’s port, and his mother managed the household. On summer breaks from university, Gilmore also worked at the port, painting buildings, shoveling coal on a steamship and crewing on harbor boats. After graduating with an economics degree, he took a job at New Zealand’s central bank. Then, like many Kiwis, he took time off to travel, backpacking solo through Asia.
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