Taxi-braggart firm’s $170M hit

The hedge fund tied to a billionaire who last year was caught on a viral video bragging to a New York City cabby about his wealth just got slammed with a massive fine for deceiving investors.

BlueCrest Capital Management — cofounded by Michael Platt, a UK-based hedge-fund manager who in a December 2019 video boasted to his taxi driver that he was “the highest-earning person in the world of finance” — will pay $170 million to settle the feds’ charges that it used an inferior computer algorithm to manage clients’ money while assigning its most promising traders to make money for its insiders.

The 52-year-old financier had gotten attention for his fateful cab ride partly because he may really have been the highest earner in finance last year. In 2018, Platt pulled down an estimated $1.2 billion, coming in second only to Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who earned $1.6 billion, according to Forbes.

Forbes didn’t publish a list for 2019 this year, but in February it reported that Platt had earned $2 billion in 2019.

During the taxi ride, Platt told his driver, “I’ve transformed my fund into a personal investment vehicle because we made such high returns. And now it’s on the Internet, on Forbes.”

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, however, BlueCrest made “material misstatements and misleading omissions” about the brain drain, which the regulator charges occurred when top talent was pulled to manage employee capital starting in 2011.

Platt’s taxi video also had gone viral because he was sharing the back of the cab with a stunning brunette who appeared to be decades his junior. Platt called her “my girlfriend, Laetitia, the love of my life.”

In a statement to The Post, the divorced tycoon later said the woman was merely a friend and “a very good person who I had been to dinner with and shared a nice bottle of wine.”