Harry Weinberg
American businessman and philanthropist
Harry Weinberg (1908–1990) was an American billionaire businessman who founded The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Inc., a private charitable foundation, with over $2 billion in assets in 2018 and headquartered in Owings Mills, Maryland and Honolulu, Hawaii. The foundation is named for Weinberg and his wife of 58 years, Jeanette Gutman Weinberg (1909–1989).
Biography
Weinberg was born in 1908 in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a poor Jewish family. His father Joseph Weinberg came to Baltimore, Maryland in the US, and sent for his family in 1912. One of his earliest ventures was selling souvenirs for celebrations at the end of World War I. He dropped out of school at age 12 and worked in his father's car repair shop.
Career
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, he and his brother William would buy properties at depressed prices, fix them up, and resell them for a profit. Throughout his career he was known for being a keen judge of undervalued assets, and having the patience to wait for their values to increase.
In Honolulu, Hawaii, he repeated this with the Fifth Avenue Coach Company, in Scranton, Pennsylvania and Dallas, Texas. He started buying stock in the Honolulu Rapid Transit and Land Company (now known as TheBus) in 1955, eventually gained control via a hostile takeover, slashed costs, and then sold it at a profit to the City & County of Honolulu in 1971.
In 1968 he moved to Hawaii where he died November 4, 1990.
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