The wonkish, softly-spoken son of Egyptian diplomat, Mohamed El-Erian makes for an unlikely media star in the fund management world.
But few have been as influential as the former International Monetary Fund veteran in shaping the debate over markets and monetary policy in recent years.
Despite spending seven years as chief executive and co-chief investment officer at the Newport Beach-headquartered firm that manages the world's biggest bond fund, the personable Mr El-Erian has found time to be an assidious writer of investment commentary and a frequent guest on business programmes on cable television
Here is a look back at how Mr El-Erian earnt his reputation:
The emerging markets manager
After 15 years at the IMF, Mr El-Erian rose to prominence as an investor in emerging markets debt for Pimco. In 1999, Mr El-Erian dumped $2bn of Argentine debt, less than two years before the country's $100bn default. At the time, few believed the country would stop being able to repay its debts.
He took a more bullish position in 2002 when, he bought Brazilian bonds just as his rivals sold out on concerns that leftist candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - who won the presidential election - would sink the country into default. After Mr Lula da Silva took office, he cut government expenses and the deficit and Brazil bonds rose.
Harvard
In 2005, he left Pimco to manage Harvard University's $35bn endowment. He cut the fund's traditional dependence on bonds, shifting more assets to buyout funds and non-US markets. However, the size of the pay packages received by the endowment's money managers came under criticism - Mr El-Erian received a compensation package worth $2.3m that year. Less than two years after joining, he quit Harvard to return to Pimco. Following his departure the endowment suffered its worse performance in four decades during the financial crisis, with heavy losses on its hedge fund and private equity investments.
The "New Normal"
Apart from his op-eds for publications like the Financial Times, Mr-El Erian captured the zeitgeist when he coined the post-financial crisis phrase the "new normal" in 2009.
The phrase described an expectation that industrial countries would face sluggish growth, persistently high unemployment, private sector de-leveraging and sovereign debt issues for a long time.
In a note to investors, he expressed the notion of the "new normal" with a quote from Bob Dylan's song "Forever Young," which includes the lines: "May your hands always be busy/May your feet always be swift/May you have a strong foundation/when the winds of change shift."
Investment performance
As joint chair of Pimco's investment committee, alongside the asset manager's talismanic investor Bill Gross, Mr El-Erian helped to steer the firm through the financial crisis of 2008 better than most peers, leaving Pimco well placed to capitalise as investors poured money into bond funds in the years that followed.
However he has also been at the helm when bold calls have gone awry, most notably when Pimco cut US Treasury holdings to zero in its flagship fund at the start of 2011, a tumultous year when US debt proved to be the best performing asset class. Justifying the move, he said: "Everything you buy and hold must have value".
More recently, 2013 saw losses for many bond funds as long-term interest rates began to rise from multi-decade lows, and changes in central bank behaviour wrongfooted investors. For instance, Mr El-Erian was co-manager of Pimco's $2.3bn Global Multi-Asset Fund, which lost 8.4 per cent in 2013. The index against which it measures performance rose 26.7 per cent.
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