John Rockfeller.

JOHN ROCKFELLER. 

John Rockfeller, Jr was best known as a businessman and as a major philanthropist. He donated over $537 millions in many philanthropic causes and he was known to be the only financier of a 14 building real estate complex in the geographical center of Manhattan, the Rockfeller Center. He is also interested in natural conservations and donated land to the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoning and the Acadia National Park in Maine.

John Rockfeller was born on the 29^th January 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio in the United States. He was the last and fifth child of the renowned businessman and Standard Oil industrialist, John Rockfeller and his wife Laura Celestia Spelman. John Junior used to attend the Park Avenue Baptist Church and he studies in Browning School which was in a brownstone owned by the powerful family of Rockfellers. The young man wanted to attend Yale Universoty but was discouraged to do so  by William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, who persuaded him into entering the Baptist-oriented Brown university.

At that time, John Junior was being taught a bible class and his extremem consciousness actually differentiated him from the other students who were most of the time spoilt. In 1897, he graduated from the university with a degree of Bachelor of Arts. During his years of education, John Junior had studies several courses in social studies and he was also elected the Phi Beta Kappa in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

After his graduation from university, John Junior started working in his father’s business on the 1^st October 1897. He was working as one of the directors from the office at Standard Oil’s headquarters at 26 Broadway. After a scandal which onvolved the head of Standard Oil, John Dustin Archbold, and bribes to congressmen, John Junior decided to resign from both companies in 1910. He wanted to sho that his philanthropy was free from commercial and financial interests. In April 1914, there was a massacre which occurred at a coal mining company, CFI. John Junior, who had controlling stocks in the company, was the only one absent that day while twenty people there died in the massacre. The American businessman had to present a testimony following the massacre before the US Commission on Industrial Relations on January 1915 and was later advised by William Lyon MacKenzie King and Ivy Lee to meet the union organizer and to admit his fault in the testimony. This was believed by MacKenzie to be the turning point of Rockfeller Jr’s life and il helped to restore the reputation of the Rockfeller family.

During the Great Depression, Rockfeller Junior developed and stood out to be one of the largest real estate holders in New York City. He was the lone financier of the Rockfeller Centre and his influential status invited several blue chip companies to be tenants in the complex  in 1921, Rockfeller Junior was given 10% of the shares of the Equitable Truct Company form his father and thus became the bank’s largest shareholder. In 1930, the Equitable Trust Company merged with Chase National Bank and with JP Morgan Chase and thus became the largest bank in the world.  Rockfeller Junior later founded the Dunbar National Bank in Harlem in the late 1920s. This bank was a unique financial institutions in the city because of the employment of African Americans as tellers, clerks, bookkeepers and in important management positions. Unfortunately the bank was after a few years closed down.

Rockfeller Junior was however mostly remembered for his philanthropic works as he donated over $537 million to numerous important causes. One great example is that in 1900, he gave over his family money in order to fund the construction of a medical laboratory on the campus of Cornell Medical Center. The latter became a Memorial Hospital and decades later became the worldly renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The life of this great businessman and major philanthropist ended on the 11^th May 1960 when he was 86 because of pneumonia.

Donald Trump

DONALD JOHN TRUMP

Donald John Trump is a real estate developer who became involved in large profitable building projects in mostly Manhattan. In 1980, he opened the Grand Hyatt which enabled him to become the city’s best known and most controversial developer. He pursued several more development projects which made him today a billionaire businessman.

Donald John Trump, a mogul, was born on the 14^th June 1946 in the Queens, New York. He was the fourth of five children. His father, Frederick Trump was a builder and a real estate developer who specialized mostly in the construction and the operation of middle income apartments in the Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn. Donald Trump was very self-confident and active as a child and this was the reason why his parents decided to send him to the New York Military Academy when he was only 13, hoping that the severity of the school would make the child channel his energy better. Trump was both socially and academically good at the school and actually became a star athlete and a student leader by the time he graduated in 1964. He then enrolled into Fordham University and later transferred to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from the latter in 1968 with a degree in economics.

Having been influenced by his father, the young Trump decided to make a career in real estate development. However, his goals were higher than those of his father as he had a driving need to succeed in his life. After his graduation from college, Trump joined the company of this father known as the Trump Organization. He succeeded in financing an expansion of the company’s holdings by persuading his father to be more open-minded in the use of loans based on the equity in the Trump apartment complexes. However, the business was extremely competitive and profits were quite slim.

In 1971, Donald Trump decided to move his home to Manhattan where he met many influential people. The businessman was convinced that there was economic opportunity in this city and thus he became involved in large building projects in Manhattan. This would give him the prospect of earning higher profits, utilizing striking architectural designs and gaining public recognition. In 1974, Trump was able to obtain a choice on one of the Penn Central’s hotels, the Commodore, which was unbeneficial but which had an amazing location adjacent to the Grand Central Station. He agreed on a partnership the following year with the Hyatt Hotel Corporation. The intelligent businessman then worked out a complex deal with the city in order to gain a 40 year tax abatement. He then arranged the financing and renovated the building completely by constructing an outstanding façade of reflective glass designed by the architect Der Scutt.

By 1989, Trump was branching out to buy the Eastern Air Shuttle for about $365 million to rename it the Trump Shuttle. In January 1990, the real estate developer went to Los Angeles with the intention of building a $1 million commercial and residential project featuring a 15 story office building. It was however then that the real estate market declined causing Trump’s empire to lose in both value and income. The Trump Organization had to borrom enormous amount of loans to keep the company from collapsing.

However, Donald Trump climbed back from around $900 million; the successful businessman was reported to be worth close to $2 billion in 1997.

Christian Louboutin - The Genius

                                             CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

Christian Louboutin is one of the most established shoe designers in the world. It is said that he has always been fascinated by ladies’ shoes since he was a child. This passion led him to be extremely successful in shoe designing and to be one of the most famous shoe designers today.

Christian Louboutin was born on the 7^th January 1953 in Paris in the 12^th arrondissement. His father, Roger, was a cabinet maker while his mother was a homemaker. He was the only son of the family with three other sisters.  Being always awestruck by women’s shoes, Louboutin started to sketch shoe designs when he was only a teen. Being a lover of arts, he used to visit the African and Oceanic Art Museum where he actually was struck by a sign which forbid entry to women wearing stilettos in order to prevent damage to the wooden floor. The image of the thorn-like heel of a shoe slashed with a red line hit him at that moment. At the age of 12, the French designer would sneak out of school to go watch the famous showgirls of Paris or even go to a flea market at Vila do Conde. It was at this particular moment, while watching the dancers that inspiration came to him as he noticed that women looked mostly at their legs in silhouette.

With this passion driving him, Louboutin dropped out of school and joined a training at the Academie Roederer for a little amount of time where he studied drawing and decorative arts. He then travelled to Egypt and India for a year and returned to Paris to produce a design portfolio full of intricate models of high heels. At the same time, he was working as an apprentice at the Folies Bergeres, the well-known French music hall, where his passion for shoes increased even more as according to him, “nobody wears shoes like a dancer on stage”. After this episode, Charles Jourdan tutored the young designer who later freelanced at a range of illustrious ateliers such as Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent.

In 1988, Christian Louboutin joined Roger Vivier who was one of the masters of footwear at that time and who had collaborated with the likes of Dior in the 1950s. Under his supervision, Louboutin started to learn how to master the technique of making shoes and even raised his skills. Louboutin actually accredited Vivier with teaching him the heart of shoe creation where “the most important part of the shoe is the body and the heel. Like a good bone structure, if you get that right, the rest is makeup”.

The beginning of the nineties marked the time when Louboutin launched his self-named shoe atelier ‘Christian Louboutin Shoes’. The latter became best known for their exoticism and lively colours. The French designer brought the stilettos back into fashion in the nineties and into the 2000. He wished to make women look sexy, beautiful and make their legs look as long as he could and used to wish t actually create heels of 12cm or even higher. His evening-wear shoe designs included exotic embellishment and decoration such as feathers, leathers and jewel encrusted straps. The trademark for Louboutin’s shoes is the lipstick red soles of his shoes which flash when the wearer walks. The iconic symbol of the brand, simple and utterly recognizable, brings into mind the powerful image he had at the African and Oceanic Art Museum. The famous French designer also produces elegant and feminine casual shoes inspired by mostly nature and dance. He often says that his shoe designs reflect his upbringing and is actually a mixture of culture, art and history. Celebrities wearing his shoe designs are namely Elizabeth Taylor, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kylie Minogue. Christian Louboutin shoes can today be found in several boutiques worldwide and Louboutins were in fact named the sexiest heel by the Daily Telegraph with the classic black stiletto being the most famous.

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson

                                  SIR RICHARD CHARLES NICHOLAS BRANSON

The great entrepreneur, Richard Charles Nicholas Branson is a billionaire whose projects began in the music industry with a small record company known as Virgin Records but he expanded into several other sectors which made him one of the most successful men in the world.

Branson was born on the 18^th July 1950 in Surrey, England. He came from a respected family wherein his father, Edward James Branson, was a barrister and his mother, Eve Branson, was a flight attendant. As a child, Branson was known to have been struggling with dyslexia and he had a difficult time pursuing his education. He attended the Scaitcliffe School until he was 14 and was transferred to a boarding school in Stowe, Buckinghamshire, England, called Stowe School. However, since he was still struggling, he decided to drop out of school at the age of 16 and took the choice of starting a youth-culture magazine called Student. The latter was done completely by students and was sold mainly to students. In 1966, during its first edition, the magazine sold $8000 worth of advertising. The first 50 000 copies was distributed for free as Branson covered the outlay with advertising.

By 1969, Branson was staying in London, surrounded by British music and mush drug scenes. It was at this time that Branson got the idea of starting a mail-order record company which he would name Virgin in order to help support the magazine efforts. The company was quite small but was working enough so as to give Branson the opportunity to expand his business venture by adding a record shop in Oxford Street, London. The latter was a success and enabled Branson o build a recording studio in 1972 in Oxfordshire, England.

The first artist to be on the Virgin Records label was Mike Oldfield with his single “Tubular Bells” in 1973 with the help of the team that Branson had arranged. The song was an instant hit by staying on the UK charts for about 247 weeks. At the same time of Oldfield’s great success, Branson seized the moment by signing several aspiring musical groups to the label, including the Sex Pistols. Following artists like the Rolling Stones and Genesis contributed in making Virgin Records one of the top six record companies in the world.

Branson continued to expand his business by adding a travel company, the Voyager Group, in 1980, the airline Virgin Atlantic in 1984 and several Virgin Megastores. However, by 1992, Virgin Records started facing a lot of problems and struggled to stay financially afloat. During the same year, the company was bought by Thorn Emi for $1 billion. The self entrepreneur Branson was crushed by the loss but was resolute to persevere in the music business.

He founded the station Virgin Radio in the following year and in 1996 he started a second record company, V2. Branson’s Virgin Group has now more than 200 companies in over 30 countries namely the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Asia and South Africa. He added a train company, a luxury game preserve, a mobile phone company and even a space tourism company, Virgin Galactic to his business expansion.

Branson was knighted in 1999 for his exceptional contribution to entrepreneurship and in 2009 was the 261^st man in the Forbes’ World Billionaires list with $2.5 billion in self made fortune. He is well known as well for his adventurous personality and sports achievements such as being the first man who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific by hot-air balloon.