He moved back to the United States and entered Wall Street in 1929, seven months before Black Tuesday. He started out with Halle & Stieglitz and sold short RCA shares, through the stock market crash and well into the Great Depression. He founded Neuberger Berman in 1939 with Robert Berman. In 1950, Neuberger’s firm started one of the first no-load mutual funds in the United States, the Guardian Fund, which is still in operation today.

By 1939, Neuberger had made enough money to buy the first painting that he would lend out to promote the artist: Peter Hurd’s Boy from the Plains. He allowed Nelson Rockefeller, another avid art collector, to use Boy from the Plains in a travelling American art exhibition. Rockefeller’s exhibition travelled to South America, and many people in both South and North America were thus exposed to Hurd’s art.

Regarding the company he co-founded, he said “Art in the workplace has been a part of Neuberger Berman’s corporate culture since the investment firm was founded in 1939. In 1990 Neuberger Berman began developing its own art collection, emphasizing the work of emerging mid-career artists from around the world and presenting their works in an enriching environment for employees and visitors.”

Rockefeller later became governor of New York and created the State University of New York system. For his friend Neuberger, Rockefeller established a museum at Purchase College as part of the new university where Neuberger could display a substantial amount of the art he had acquired. With the help of architect Philip Johnson, the Neuberger Museum of Art was built on the SUNY Purchase College campus and opened in 1974. Neuberger contributed more than 500 of his paintings toward the collection.

In 1997, he published his memoir, So Far, So Good – the First 94 Years. His life as an art collector is chronicled in his 2003 book The Passionate Collector: Eighty Years in the World of Art. In his later years Neuberger was often seen in the company of Kitty Carlisle Hart. Neuberger died on December 24, 2010 at the age of one hundred and seven and was buried at Mount Neboh Cemetery where other members of his family were interred.

A 2002 book review titled “Conversation With The Neubergers” written shortly before the release of (father) Roy Rothschild Neuberger’s then-“forthcoming book The Passionate Collector” and shortly after release of (son) Roy Salant Neuberger’s “Updated with Thoughts on 9/11” edition of “From Central Park to Sinai” included some family tree information. Although Roy S quotes his father as having said that the Salants are “descendants of” Rabbi Yisroel Salanter”, the reviewer calls this “a lineal point that still remains to be substantiated genealogically” while noting that Mrs. Marie Salant’s father Aaron B. Salant did come from the area where Rabbi Salanter began the Musar Movement.

On November 15, 2007, President George W. Bush awarded the then-104-year-old Neuberger the 2007 National Medal of Arts. Neuberger claimed to have never sold a work of art, stating that “It would be a criminal act for me to sell”, and that “I buy because I love the work.”