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| Birth Name(s) : Ron Perelman |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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| Profession:
Public Figure |
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Full Ron Perelman Biography
Ronald Owen Perelman (born January 1, 1943) is an American billionaire investor who made his fortune buying beleaguered corporations and re-selling them later for enormous profits. Once the richest man in America, he is now the 28th richest American with an estimated wealth of USD$10 billion. He has invested in the grocery, cigar, licorice, makeup, car, photography, television, camping, security, lottery, jewelry, banks, and comic book industries.
Perelman consummated his first major business deal in 1961 during his Freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. After he was put on the scent of the Esslinger Brewery by his father, Ronald turned his attention to the details and found it an excellent deal. He and his father bought it for $800,000, then sold it three years later for a $1 million profit.
In between his purchase of Marvel and New World Communications, Perelman bought the Coleman Company for $545 million. Perelman handled the deal in his characteristic style: Buy the company, sell everything but the core business—In the case of Coleman, the camping and boating divisions—and enjoy the profits. Over the next several years, he bought nine more divisions for Coleman. In December 1997, Perelman and Al Dunlap met in order to discuss a possible deal between Coleman and Sunbeam Products. Coleman was stuck in a rut and Ronald Perelman wanted out. Coincidentally, Al Dunlap was sitting on a financially insolvent company he wanted to dump. It took until March 2 for them to finally come to an agreement: With some convincing from his banker Morgan-Stanley, Perelman sold his entire stake(82%) in Coleman to Al Dunlap in exchange for $1.5 billion in cash and $680 million of Sunbeam stock. They completed the deal on March 30, despite a sell-off triggering press release from March 19 that said Sunbeam would not meet sales expectations. On April 3, another press release took Sunbeam's stock from bad to worse: It would not only fall short of sales expectations for that quarter, but it would barely meet the sales expectations of two years ago. The stock went into a tail spin, falling from $54 a share to $24 a share in a matter of weeks and continued its death spiral in the following weeks. Perelman bought control of Sunbeam in an effort to salvage the situation but it was for naught. The company had to file for bankruptcy within three years.
On Raymond's knee, Perelman learned the fundamentals of business. By the time Ronald turned eleven years old he regularly sat in on board meetings of his father's company. Raymond was a rough teacher, harshly criticizing Ronald for even the slightest misstep.
The phrase 'cigar-chomping' tends to appear anywhere the name Ronald Perelman is written and with good reason. Perelman first lit up when he was 26 years old. Trapped in a meeting that refused to end, he noticed a lawyer named Laddie Montague light up a cigar and start happily puffing away. Perelman asked if he could try one. From that day until he quit in 1999, he smoked between one and five cigars a day. Perelman had Consolidated Cigar manufacture a custom 38-ring H. Upmann-style cigar just for him. The media speculated extensively about the exact reason he quit; New York magazine claimed his new wife, Ellen Barkin, made him quit, and Forbes suggested he quit because he sold Consolidated Cigar. Perelman set the record straight in an interview with Institutional Investor: he quit at the encouragement of his youngest daughters, Samantha and Caleigh, whom he lived with.
Religion has had a strong influence on Perelman's life. He grew up in a Conservative household, and had a religious reawakening at the age of eighteen while on a family trip to Israel. "I felt not just this enormous pride at being a Jew; I felt this enormous void at not being a better Jew. So I decided then to begin being a better Jew. As soon as I got married, we kept a kosher house, we became much more observant. We moved to New York shortly thereafter and joined an Orthodox synagogue and the kids grew up with much more Judaism surrounding them than I ever did". Today, he strictly observes the Jewish Sabbath, spends three hours every Saturday in prayer, keeps a kosher home, and donates millions to Jewish groups and causes, particularly the ultra-conservative Chabad-Lubavitch sect. He does not consider himself to be a member of Lubavitch. He supports them because he thinks they are Judaism's best chance for surviving and thriving in modern society.
He was first accused of greenmail in late 1986 during a run at CPC International when he bought 8.2% of CPC at around $75 a share and indirectly sold it back to CPC through Salomon Brothers a month later at 88.5 a share for a $40 million profit. Both CPC and Perelman denied it was greenmail despite appearances to the contrary, including what looked like an artificial price increase by Salomon shortly before they sold Perelman's shares. |
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