“There are so many good people here,” Danoff said. “They attend the same meetings and know the same executives that I do.”

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He goes on: “They are very capable and successful now, and they will do a great job when I eventually retire.”

Perhaps to prove the point, several veteran Fidelity fund managers joined Danoff during the phone interview. Among them: Jason Weiner, a co-manager at the top-performing $11 billion Growth Fund; Steve Kaye, who manages north of $50 billion in Fidelity’s Balanced and All Sector Equity funds; and long-time portfolio manager Joel Tillinghast.

Team Player

Colleagues characterize Danoff as affable and a team player. But there’s no denying his name and track record carry a lot of weight inside and outside Fidelity. Between the Contrafund, related strategies and private investment mandates, he single-handedly manages roughly $300 billion. That’s more money in one person’s hands than in the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, which manages about $112 billion.

In all, Danoff is sitting on more than 3% of Meta and about 1% of AI darling Nvidia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Danoff has been so successful that he has practically become a brand unto himself. Around Boston, he’s something of a local celebrity. In 2016, Fidelity released an advertisement showing a man typing a letter to him and enclosing a photograph of his son, saying he had invested in the Contrafund to save for the child’s college education. The tag line: “At Fidelity we don’t just manage money, we manage people’s money.”

Years later, Danoff’s colleagues tracked down the boy, by then grown. He’d graduated from college, had a son of his own and was still invested in Contrafund. Danoff said he keeps in touch with the family.

Still, the Contrafund is hardly immune to the forces reshaping the mutual fund industry. Rising stock prices have lifted its assets under management from one high to the next. But customers keep taking chips off the table.

Clients have withdrawn money in 20 of the past 34 years — about $90 billion in all — and the fund has recorded outflows in almost every month since May 2012, according to Morningstar data. Some of that cash has gone into other Fidelity strategies or could reflect redemptions from people who reached their investment goals and took profits.

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Some analysts caution that Danoff’s recent performance has hinged on Meta and Nvidia, which together make up about 25% of Contrafund’s assets. Winners like those can inflate returns on the way up — and crush them on the way down.

“Why should we sell the big winners?” he said. After long years of success, some investors might be sympathetic if markets turn against him. During a rare bad year for Contrafund, a passerby spotted Danoff on the street near Fidelity’s headquarters.

“Keep going!” the person told him.

For now, that’s precisely what Danoff plans to do. He also might work on his tennis game. About a decade ago, he partnered with Zuckerberg in a doubles round-robin.

They won.

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