Right: Thomas Kaplain at his Manhattan office L to R: Gold Nugget Courtesy of Museum Victoria; Caroll Taveras

By Jason Kelly

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"I'm not a goldbug, but there are times when I feel like an evangelist for it," says Thomas Kaplan, an Oxford-educated historian and chairman of Manhattan-based Tigris Financial Group. "To my amazement, it's a hard sell. The conventional wisdom is that gold is for primitives. That derision shows me that contrary to the notion we're in a bubble, we haven't yet begun the real bull market."

The 47-year-old New York-born billionaire is a bundle of eccentricities, from his unplaceable but alien accent to his three-piece suits and his decidedly un-Wall Street way of talking ("as...