£3bn a year! Hedge fund boss's astonishing pay (that's £8.5m a day or £100 for EVERY second)

Biggest payday in history: John Paulson earned £3bn last year - 125,000 times the average British wage of around £25,000

A hedge fund manager is celebrating possibly the biggest payday in history – after earning more than £3billion in a year.

John Paulson, 54, made the astonishing pile of cash in 2010 by investing in commodities such as gold and oil, and in developing economies rather than Europe and America.

The payout is the equivalent of £350,000 an hour or £100 a second.

Mr Paulson’s clients are delighted at the success of his fund – but the billionaire has his enemies.

The American came under fire after it emerged he had amassed £2.5billion in 2007 by successfully predicting the credit crunch, and making huge financial bets on it happening.

Criticism grew when it last year emerged that Mr Paulson – nicknamed ‘the undertaker’ – had helped Goldman Sachs design investments in mortgages for the low-paid that he personally believed were doomed to lose money.

Supporters counter that Mr Paulson simply spots opportunities and makes the most of them.

Certainly his firm, Paulson & Co, delivered huge profits last year. Its £20billion investment portfolio reported growth of more than 10 per cent, earning him personally a ‘performance fee’ of more than £600million.

But he also has huge sums of his own money invested in the fund, and his personal stake grew by another £2.5billion, giving him his total earnings for the year of £3.1billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

In practice, Mr Paulson is likely to have only a small percentage of his earnings paid into his bank account, with most being rolled back into his investment fund in the hope of earning even more.

The married father of two already owns a £15million mansion in New York and has one of the finest homes in the costly Hamptons oceanside resort.

He is, however, said to take the subway and bus to work and regularly eats lunch at his desk.

Mr Paulson, whose total fortune is around £15billion, realised in 2005 that the property boom was unsustainable and searched for a way to profit from the coming slump. He bought huge volumes of insurance which would pay out if householders defaulted on mortgages.

Mr Paulson grew up in New York’s working-class borough of Queens. He launched himself in business at the age of six by splitting up packets of sweets and selling them individually at a profit.

He is said to have lived a ‘playboy lifestyle’ until his 40s when he decided to look for a ‘cheerful wife’ and realised the ideal candidate was his PA, Jenny.