Martin Sorrell
British businessman
Sir Martin Stuart Sorrell (born 14 February 1945) is a British businessman and the founder of WPP plc. Sorrell was the longest-serving chief executive of a FTSE 100 company.
He was consistently one of the UK's highest-paid corporate executives. According to The Sunday Times Rich List in 2019, Sorrell was worth £368 million. Sorrell has served on boards and advisory bodies of a number of high-profile public, academic and business organisations, including several leading business schools, both in the UK and internationally.
Early life and education
Martin Stuart Sorrell was born in London on 14 February 1945 to a Jewish family: his father was an electronics retailer, whose ancestors came from Ukraine, Poland and Romania. He was educated at the independent Haberdashers' Boys' School, then studied economics at Christ's College, Cambridge, and gained an MBA from Harvard University in 1968.
Career
Early career
Sorrell joined Glendinning Associates, then James Gulliver and then worked for the sports agent Mark McCormack. He joined Saatchi & Saatchi in 1975, and was group finance director from 1977 until 1984. Often referred to as "the third brother", he identified and oversaw many of Saatchi's agency acquisitions.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1395663. VIAF identifies the subject as 101574755. The Library of Congress control number is no2009173322. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 2019, 1968 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martin Sorrell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.