How Ray Dalio found pee on the bathroom floor at Bridgewater: book

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio once fumed that “there’s piss on the floor” on the men’s bathroom at Bridgewater Associates’ headquarters — and implemented his famed mantra of “radical transparency” to crack what became known internally as the “piss case,” according to a new book.

The explosive exposé by reporter Rob Copeland, titled “The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend,” hit bookstores on Tuesday and detailed one fateful day at Bridgewater’s Westport, Conn., office when Dalio excused himself from a meeting to use the restroom.

The 74-year-old billionaire noticed pee on the floor in front of a urinal and, per Copeland’s account, found it “inconceivable that it could be an accident,” per an excerpt of the book published by New York Magazine.

“If people can’t aim their f–king pee, they can’t work here,” Dalio said before angrily emailing his 1,000-staff workforce: “There’s piss on the floor.”

Dalio went on to prove just how serious he was about the “radical transparency” he promoted, beginning with summoning the hedge fund’s head of facilities for questioning about the puddle of urine, per Copeland’s book.

Staffers were then assigned to guard the restroom, standing outside and making notes of who entered and how clean the floors were when they left, with a member of the cleaning crew on standby to mop up the floor.

Dalio also ordered that stickers be placed on the urinals to serve as a target for the men working at Bridgewater’s Connecticut nerve center — and then examined the exact placement of the stickers, according to Copeland.

New urinals were even installed “for testing,” Copeland wrote.

However, after all that, the case went cold. Dalio was never able to get to the bottom of the piss case, the book revealed.

This incident was just one painstaking example of how Dalio obsessed over upholding what he called his “Principles,” which Copeland said “held that no matter was too small for investigation.”

Among the hundreds of principles, one that stood out said: “People have to value getting at truth so badly that they are willing to humiliate themselves to get it.”

Other principles conveyed in Bridgewater’s “Transparency Library” of instructional videos told staffers to “probe” each other’s work on a daily basis, have the “ability to self-assess” and “push through to results,” per Copeland’s tell-all book.

Dalio in 2017 published a best-selling autobiography titled “Principles” to bring his fundamentals beyond Bridewater’s roughly 1,500 staffers to the general public — and then turned it into a children’s book in 2021.

Representatives for Bridgewater did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Ahead of the release of “The Fund,” Dalio reportedly worked keep ugly anecdotes such as the piss case under wraps, hiring a team of high-priced lawyers to threaten the publication of the book.

Earlier this year, Dalio and Bridgewater — the world’s largest hedge fund with as much as $168 billion under management — threatened a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, according to letters obtained by The Post.

Despite Dalio’s best efforts, the 352-page book, which claimed in promotional materials it “punctures this carefully-constructed narrative of the benevolent business titan,” was published by Macmillan on Tuesday anyways.

Now, the explosive biography is poised to get the Hollywood treatment, sources told The Post, revealing that Amazon Studios scooped up the rights to the book last month with plans to develop it as a scripted series.