Henry Hillman

Henry Lea Hillman (December 25, 1918 – April 14, 2017) was an American billionaire businessman, investor, civic leader, and philanthropist.

[5] Hillman attended Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and Princeton University,[6] where he earned an A.B.

[7] He enlisted in the Navy before the United States entered World War II[8] in December 1941 and served first as an aide to Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, chief of the Bureau of Naval Personnel.

As vice president and a director, Henry expanded the company's manufacture and sale of finished chemicals and plasticizers.

[10] As a director of Pittsburgh's Colonial Trust Company, he worked with his father in 1959 to negotiate the consolidation of smaller banks and trust companies into Pittsburgh National Bank, ancestor of PNC Financial Services, today one of the largest financial institutions in the United States.

[9] Through this fund and others, as well as directly, Hillman invested in Genentech, Tandem Computers, Hybritech, and numerous other high-tech start-ups in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

[citation needed] The Hillman Company also became what Forbes magazine described as "one of the country's largest, and lowest-profile, commercial real estate developers", with properties from California to Florida.

Energy exploration and investments during this same period included early and active development of coal-bed methane, a dynamic new segment of the petroleum industry.