They teamed up to conquer Wall Street. Now, one is bankrolling Clinton and the other Trump

When Republican senators investigated a little-known San Francisco nonprofit steering as much as 50 million a year to climate change activists, the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News pounced on the report. Breitbart branded the organization, the Sea Change Foundation, as a vehicle for "rich liberals who are secretly funding the green movement's war on Western industrial civilization." As it turned out, though, the money to support both Sea Change and Breitbart came from the same place -- Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund based on Long Island, N.Y., churning astonishing profits with a formula of algorithms and equations that only a select group of math geniuses understand. In recent years, the masterminds behind Renaissance have put their billions to work reshaping the political landscape -- but in divergent and opposing ways. The political evolution of Renaissance founder James Simons, a mathematician who worked as a U.S. code-breaker, and his star recruit, computer scientist and poker ace Robert Mercer, reflects one of the strangest permutations of the new era of super-donors in American politics.