Sam Zell

Samuel Zell (born Shmuel Zielonka; September 28, 1941 – May 18, 2023) was an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist primarily engaged in real estate investment.

[2][4] They immigrated to the United States with their young daughter, Leah, via Russia and Tokyo, pretending to be tourists at the Bolshoi Ballet so as not to stand out.

[5][6][2][7] They then moved from Seattle to Albany Park, Chicago, where his father became a wholesale jeweler who also made successful investments in real estate and the stock market.

He later bought Playboy magazines in downtown Chicago and resold them to his classmates in Hebrew school for a 200% markup.

[2] In 1963, Zell graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, where he was also a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.

[8] Joined by his fraternity brother Robert H. Lurie, he won a contract with a large apartment development owner in Ann Arbor.

[6] In 1968, Zell founded the predecessor of Equity Residential and was joined a year later by his former partner, Robert H. Lurie.

[10] During the early 1990s recession, Zell had personally guaranteed $600 million in loans and was working 80 hour weeks to resolve them.

[16] In 1988, he co-founded the first of four Zell/Merrill Lynch Real Estate Opportunity Partners Funds; these were consolidated into EQ Office in 1997.

[18] In 1985, Zell acquired Itel Corporation, a diversified transportation and logistics company, shortly after it emerged from bankruptcy.

[21] In 1992, it acquired an interest in Jacor, a radio broadcast group that included a television station, which was sold to Clear Channel Communications in 1999.

[26] In a decision sharply criticized by the employees, Zell immediately put Randy Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey with no newspaper experience, in charge.

He also oversaw 4,200 layoffs while giving large bonuses to the executives and hosting lavish beer-and-poker parties in the office of former publisher Robert R. McCormick, long considered a shrine.

[27] In December 2008, less than a year after Zell acquired the company, due to the increased debt and the effects of the Great Recession, the company filed the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion.

[30][1] In 1983, Zell endowed the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania's Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center.

[5] Zell also donated to Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, a free market oriented Israeli think tank founded by Daniel Doron, the American Jewish Committee and the Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School, a Chicago Jewish primary school named after his father.

[47][1] Zell donated $100,000 to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign.