Aristotle Socrates Onassis was born on January 20, 1906, into the prosperous Greek community of Smyrna (modern İzmir), then a cosmopolitan Ottoman port. That world was annihilated in September 1922, when Turkish forces retook the city at the close of the Greco-Turkish War and the Greek and Armenian quarters burned in what Greeks remember as the Catastrophe of Smyrna. The Onassis family’s businesses and property were lost, his father was imprisoned, and several relatives — three uncles, an aunt, her husband, and their daughter — died in a church fire at Akhisar. Barely sixteen, Aristotle escaped, and in 1923 he sailed to Argentina on a Nansen passport with only about $250 to his name.
In Buenos Aires he took a night job as a telephone operator with the British United River Plate Telephone Company, using the lines to sharpen his English and absorb how business was done, while studying commerce on the side. He then built an import business in Oriental (Turkish-style) tobacco, reportedly earning around $100,000 in commissions within a couple of years and taking Argentine citizenship in 1929. The tobacco trade made his first real money and taught him how goods moved across oceans. In the depths of the Great Depression he made the move that defined him: in 1932 he bought six idle Canadian National freighters for roughly $20,000 each — a fraction of their value — gambling that shipping would recover. It did.
From that counter-cyclical bet Onassis built one of the largest privately held shipping fleets in the world, eventually exceeding seventy vessels. He was an early and aggressive builder of oil tankers — his Ariston, delivered in 1938, was the largest tanker afloat — and then of the giant ‘supertankers’ that carried Middle Eastern crude to a booming postwar West. He ran a whaling fleet, founded the national airline Olympic Airways in 1957, and for a time controlled the company that operated Monte Carlo’s casino and resorts. By the 1950s and 1960s he was routinely described as the world’s richest shipowner.
Onassis became as famous for his life as for his fleet — his private Aegean island of Skorpios, his yacht the Christina, his long affair with the opera star Maria Callas, and his 1968 marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the assassinated U.S. president. The glamour sat atop genuine self-invention: a stateless teenage refugee who arrived with a couple of hundred dollars and died in 1975 with an estate valued at over $500 million. The end was shadowed by grief — the 1973 death of his only son, Alexander, in a plane crash broke him — and his empire did not long survive him intact.
András István Gróf was born on September 2, 1936, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a dairyman. His childhood was shaped by catastrophe. As a small boy he survived a near-fatal case of scarlet fever that permanently damaged his hearing, and during the Second World War he and his mother survived the Nazi and Hungarian Arrow Cross persecution of Hungary’s Jews by hiding under false identities while his father was taken to a labor camp. He told this story in his memoir, Swimming Across.
A decade later, history nearly swallowed him again. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the twenty-year-old fled across the border to Austria and made his way to the United States as a refugee, arriving in 1957 nearly penniless and speaking little English. He Anglicized his name to Andrew Grove, worked his way through the City College of New York to a degree in chemical engineering in 1960, and went on to earn a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963.
Grove joined the semiconductor industry at its birth. After working at Fairchild Semiconductor, he became one of the very first employees of Intel when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded it in 1968 — effectively their operational right hand. Over the next three decades he rose to president in 1979 and chief executive in 1987, and it was Grove, as much as anyone, who built Intel into the dominant force in microprocessors and the engine of the personal-computer era.
Under his leadership Intel made the pivotal, painful decision to abandon the memory-chip business it had pioneered and bet the company on microprocessors — a gamble that made it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1997, Grove was a refugee with damaged hearing and no money who became one of the defining figures of the computer age, and a celebrated teacher of management besides.
Li Ka-shing was born on July 29, 1928, in Chaozhou (Chiu Chow), in Guangdong province in southern China, into a family of schoolteachers of modest means. When Japan invaded, the family fled as refugees to Hong Kong around 1940, arriving with little. His father, a teacher, contracted tuberculosis and died a few years later, and Li — the eldest son, still a boy of about fifteen — left school to support his mother and younger siblings, taking work in a plastics trading firm where he rose quickly from menial labor to salesman.
In 1950, at about twenty-two, Li used his savings and borrowed money to start his own small manufacturer, which he named Cheung Kong (Yangtze River) Industries. The firm’s breakthrough was plastic flowers, cheap and lifelike imitations he learned to make after studying Italian techniques; they became a hit in the postwar West, and the export profits gave Li his first real capital. From that foundation he made the pivot that built the fortune: he poured manufacturing profits into Hong Kong real estate, buying property and land when prices were depressed — including during the unrest of the late 1960s — and holding for the long rise that followed.
Cheung Kong Holdings went public in 1972, and in 1979 Li made the move that announced him as a major force: he acquired control of Hutchison Whampoa, one of the great British-run trading houses, or ‘hongs,’ becoming the first ethnic Chinese to take over such a colonial-era conglomerate. Over the following decades he expanded across ports, retail, telecommunications, energy, and utilities on several continents, earning the nickname ‘Superman’ for his deal-making. He became, for years running, the richest man in Asia, with a fortune Forbes has placed in the tens of billions of dollars.
Li is a living person, and the public record of his rise is unusually well documented. He retired from the chairmanship of his companies — restructured into CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings — in May 2018 at the age of 89, handing control to his elder son, Victor Li. Through the Li Ka Shing Foundation, which he established in 1980 and has called his ‘third son,’ he has given billions of dollars to education and medical causes, most prominently founding and funding Shantou University in his home province. His story is the archetypal postwar Hong Kong rise from refugee poverty to global wealth.