Two 'Masters of the Universe' city tycoons pocket £1billion

Hedge fund managers Noam Gottesman and Pierre Lagrange will each get £135 million in cash and £340 million in shares.

Their stakes in GLG Partners could climb even further if share prices increase after the announcement today of plans to float on the New York Stock Exchange.

GLG Partners has established itself as one of the elite of Europe's hedge funds. Mr Gottesman, 45, and Mr Lagrange, 44, have been called "Masters of the Universe". They have traded up to £10 billion of funds using complex financial instruments to increase the return on investors' money.

Their clients include some of Britain's richest people, the families of European industrialists, sheikhs and Asian energy barons.

The float comes amid growing debate over the amount of money being made in the City. Last week MPs probed the role of private equity and the amount of tax paid by some traders.

GLG disclosed its flotation plan in the wake of the massive success of a similar scheme which saw Blackstone Partners float on the NYSE with its shares six times oversubscribed.

Mr Gottesman is a UK passport holding American who has lived in Britain for most of his life and Mr Lagrange is a London-based Belgian.

They set up GLG a decade ago after glittering careers as two of Goldman Sachs greatest ever traders.

Today in Mr Gottesman's first interview, he exclusively tells the Evening Standard the secret of their success. "Paranoia," he said. "The secret is about what the clients want."

Asked what he spends his formidable wealth on, Mr Gottesman, who helped Tate Britain buy work by Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, said: "My interests are art and my family."

Mr Gottesman is believed to own a string of addresses though he and his wife Geraldine and their four school age children use a £20 million six-storey Mayfair townhouse - complete with chef and other staff - as their base.

Mr Lagrange owns £21 million Wood Perry House in Oxfordshire, which has been called a "Buckingham Palace in miniature". He, wife Catherine and their three children spend much of their time at a £15 million house in Chelsea.

GLG employs around 300 people - around 60 per cent of them British - in offices in Curzon Street which has become home of the world's powerful hedge fund community.