By Laurence Arnold, Bloomberg
A city-enhancing “starchitect,” a savior of IBM, a revered fashion designer and the founding chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission were among the notable business and finance figures who died in 2025.
Here is a partial list of those who passed away, with each entry linked to a full obituary:
Virginia McCaskey, the third woman to hold a majority stake in a National Football League team when she inherited the Chicago Bears from her celebrated father, George Halas, died on Feb. 6 at 102. She was “fed up with mediocrity,” her son said in 2014.
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Horst Paulmann, the German-born billionaire who founded Chile’s Cencosud SA, South America’s largest retailer by sales, died on March 11 at 89. Reflecting Paulmann’s personal ambitions, Cencosud developed Santiago’s Gran Torre Costanera, the tallest building in South America.
Lee Shau-Kee, the Hong Kong billionaire whose business empire included real estate, utilities and public infrastructure, died on March 17 at 97. Known as Asia’s Warren Buffett, he founded Henderson Land Development Co. in 1973; its properties include Hong Kong’s International Finance Centre. His estimated fortune of $23 billion ranked third in Hong Kong at the time of his death, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
George Foreman, the two-time heavyweight boxing champion who became a successful entrepreneur, died on March 21 at 76. His infomercials promoting the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine — typically shorthanded as the “George Foreman grill” — reportedly earned him hundreds of millions of dollars.
Stef Wertheimer, the Israeli industrialist who sold his metal-cutting tool company to Warren Buffett for $6 billion, died on March 26 at 98. Wertheimer had founded Iscar Metalworking Cos. in the 1950s, bought up manufacturing plants in countries such as South Korea and Japan and sold cutting tools to automakers and airplane manufacturers. “The company he built is just remarkable,” Buffett said in a 2013 tribute. “Just as remarkable is the life he has led.”
Wayne Angell, who brought a farmer’s wariness of inflation to US monetary policy-making during an eight-year term on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors starting in 1986, died on April 19 at 94. Angell had nostalgia for the gold standard, favored using commodity prices as a reference point for inflation and cast eight dissenting votes on the Federal Open Market Committee — tied for seventh-most by any governor in Fed history.
Jose “Pepe” Mujica, who made Uruguay the first country in the world to legalize cannabis, died on May 13 at 89. A former left-wing guerrilla who spent more than a decade in prison, he was known for his austere lifestyle while president from 2010 to 2015. His signature cannabis law has yet to deliver the avalanche of investment and exports its backers promised.
Charles Rangel, the US congressman from New York City’s Harlem who for four decades used his perch on the House tax-writing committee to advocate for inner cities and the people who live there, died on May 26 at 94. “I don’t believe there’s any compassion in capitalism at all,” he said in 2013. “I believe it’s survival of the fittest.”
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Stanley Fischer, who helped lead central banks in Israel and the US and mentored a younger generation of economic decision-makers, died on May 31 at 81. He was vice chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017 following eight years as governor of the Bank of Israel, adding to a resume that included time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Citigroup Inc.
Edgar Lungu, Zambia’s president from 2015 to 2021 who clashed with investors in the mining industry and oversaw a massive ramp-up in state debt, died on June 5 at 68. His government tried to extract more tax revenue from copper mining, which generates about 70% of the country’s exports.
David Murdock, a high school dropout who became a billionaire and the longtime owner of Dole Food Co., one of the world’s largest producers of bananas and pineapples, died on June 9 at 102. He encouraged proper nutrition and healthy living in others and practiced it himself, saying in 2011 he saw no reason he couldn’t live to 125.
Leonard Lauder, who built Estée Lauder Cos. into one of the world’s biggest cosmetics makers and catapulted himself into the top echelon of wealthy New Yorkers, died on June 14 at 92. In almost 40 years running the company founded by his parents, Lauder oversaw the launch or acquisition of such brands as Clinique, MAC Cosmetics, Jo Malone London and La Mer, and he took the company public in 1995.
William Bagley, a veteran California legislator who moved to Washington in 1975 to preside over the chaotic first years of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as its founding chairman, died on June 9 at 96. He was allocated just $11 million to lead a new agency charged with overseeing the nation’s 14 commodities and futures exchanges and several dozen tradable commodities including soybeans, pork bellies and gold coins.
Fred Smith, who transformed the parcel shipping industry by risking his family’s fortune to found FedEx Corp. in 1971, died on June 21 at 80. Smith first conceived of a hub-and-spoke network to deliver packages overnight by jet aircraft in 1965 while attending Yale University. After two tours in Vietnam as a Marine, he convinced investors to back the concept.
S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire founder of Slim-Fast meal-replacement shakes, died on June 29 at 100. The Slim-Fast concept sprang from a 1970s diet craze that spurned solid food in favor of high-protein shakes. Abraham sold his company in 2000 to Unilever NV for $2.3 billion.
Wesley LePatner, a top executive in Blackstone Inc.’s $325 billion real estate business, was killed on July 28 when a gunman opened fire at the company’s Manhattan headquarters. She was 43. Hailed as “wicked smart” by Blackstone President Jon Gray, she had risen through the ranks over a decade to become chief executive officer of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, a $53 billion property owner.
Donald Weeden, who as chairman of securities firm Weeden & Co. clashed with New York Stock Exchange officials in the 1970s over what he and others saw as anticompetitive rules and practices, died on July 24 at 95. Weeden’s firm was the most important player in the “third market,” where exchange-listed securities were sold over the counter — a practice that ran counter to an NYSE rule prohibiting member broker-dealers from executing stock transactions “off-board” without permission.
Morton Meyerson, a top aide at Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems Corp. who helped run his friend’s 1992 independent campaign for the presidency, died on Aug. 5 at 87. A fixture of Dallas’s business community, he spent 10 years leading the committee that brought into being the city’s I.M. Pei-designed symphony hall, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.
Goh Cheng Liang, who was born into poverty and built a paint empire that made him the second-wealthiest person in Singapore, died on Aug. 12 at 98. Goh founded Nippon Paint South East Asia, or Nipsea, which manages Asia Pacific’s biggest paint-making businesses.
Jackie Bezos, a fierce protector of her son Jeff before he founded Amazon.com Inc. and a deep-pocketed advocate for early childhood education, died on Aug. 14 at 78. She and her husband, Miguel, provided the first investments in Amazon — two checks totaling $245,573 in 1995. That and subsequent purchases of Amazon shares netted them a fortune estimated to be as large as $30 billion in 2018.
Charles Plosser, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia who became an outspoken critic of the Fed’s easy-money policies following the 2008 financial crisis, died on Aug. 14 at 76. He warned that keeping interest rates pinned near zero for too long would spur unwelcome inflation, and he cast three dissenting votes during his rotations on the FOMC.
Raymond Mason, who pursued mergers and acquisitions over a four-decade span to expand Legg Mason Inc. into one of the largest money managers in the US, died on Aug. 22 at 88. The firm’s flagship fund, Legg Mason Value Trust, beat the S&P 500 Index for 15 years straight until 2006 under star manager Bill Miller, whom Mason hired in 1981.
Giorgio Armani, the billionaire designer who established one of the world’s most revered fashion labels and helped define the “Made in Italy” slogan as a sign of quality for consumers, died on Sept. 4 at 91. Keeping tight control along the way, Armani fought for decades to keep his company independent amid the mergers and acquisitions that reshaped the luxury sector.
Robert Redford, the quintessentially handsome leading man who starred in acclaimed movies, won an Academy Award as a director and was hailed as the “godfather of indie films” for founding the Sundance Film Festival, died on Sept. 16 at 89. Revenue from his Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah helped finance a laboratory for filmmakers that grew, in 1981, into the Sundance Institute, sponsor of the largest independent movie festival in the US.
Takatoshi Ito, a Columbia University professor whose role in bringing inflation targeting to Japan helped trigger one of the most aggressive monetary easing experiments in modern history, died on Sept. 20 at 74. He persuaded Bank of Japan then-Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, his former boss at Japan’s Finance Ministry, to aim for stable inflation of 2%.
Oscar Wyatt, the Houston oilman who once served prison time for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq to win contracts at a time when the United Nations was enforcing limits on sales of Iraqi oil, died on Oct. 8 at 101. The native Texan, one of the last of the old-school oil moguls, spent half a century turning an $850 loan into a Fortune 500 energy company, Coastal Corp., which he sold to El Paso Energy Corp. in 2001 for more than $20 billion.
Douglas Lebda, the founder and chief executive officer of LendingTree Inc., died on Oct. 12 following an all-terrain vehicle accident. He was 55. Lebda founded the lender in 1996 after experiencing the complexities of getting his first home mortgage.
Francisco Pinto Balsemão, one of Portugal’s most influential political figures and builder of a domestic media empire, died on Oct. 21 at 88. He launched Expresso in 1973 as the country’s first weekly newspaper and created Portugal’s first private television channel, SIC, in 1992.
Alfred Broaddus, a sometimes lonely voice advocating for higher interest rates during the 1990s investment boom as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, died on Oct. 26 at 86. During his rotations on the FOMC, Broaddus dissented three times in 1994 and three times in 1997 as the committee, under then-Chairman Alan Greenspan, voted to hold interest rates steady.
Gopichand Hinduja, chairman and the latest patriarch of a sprawling business empire that produced one of the world’s largest family fortunes, died on Nov. 4 at 85. The industrialist commonly known in business circles as “GP” was the second-eldest of four brothers who for decades controlled Mumbai-based Hinduja Group, a closely held conglomerate that employs more than 200,000 people in 38 countries with activities spanning health care, energy and media.
Claude Bebear, who built Axa SA into the world’s third-biggest insurer and was a force behind mergers and corporate shakeups that helped French business to compete on the world stage, died in early November at 90. He played a decisive role in a three-way takeover battle that culminated in the creation of France’s biggest bank, BNP Paribas SA, in 1999.
Bodil Nyboe Andersen, Denmark’s first female central bank governor, died on Nov. 27 at 85. She described her term as “some of the most dramatic years” in Danish monetary policy, during which she defended the fixed exchange rate policy in 1992 and 1993 and handled a banking crisis.
Hans-Joerg Rudloff, a giant figure in European finance whose cunning and aggressiveness transformed the 1980s Eurobond market, died on Dec. 1 at 85. His ingenuity and risk appetite helped solidify Credit Suisse First Boston Ltd. as the preeminent firm for Eurobonds during the deregulation of world capital markets.
Frank Gehry, the architect whose undulating, titanium-sheathed museum turned little-known Bilbao, Spain, into an international travel destination and ushered in an era of spectacular form-making, died on Dec. 5 at 96. A pioneer in using computer software to turn whimsical designs into precise building plans, Gehry showed the city-enhancing potential of contemporary architecture.
Arthur Carter, the investment banker turned publisher who co-founded Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill, the Wall Street firm that propelled the careers of former Citigroup Inc. chairman Sanford “Sandy” Weill and former US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt, died on Dec. 7 at 93. Outside his legacy on Wall Street, Carter was known for starting the New York Observer and Litchfield County Times newspapers.
Robert Mnuchin, a pioneer of block trading during a 33-year career at Goldman, Sachs & Co. who had a second career as a prominent art dealer and whose son served as US Treasury during President Donald Trump’s first term, died on Dec. 19 at 92. With Gus Levy, senior partner from 1969 to 1976, Mnuchin made Goldman Sachs an innovator in moving huge blocks of securities — often hundreds of thousands of shares in a single company — in a single transaction, matching buyers and sellers in a way that didn’t disrupt the market.
Louis Gerstner, who took over International Business Machines Corp. when it was on its deathbed and resuscitated it as a technology industry leader, died on Dec. 27 at 83. He was the first outsider to run IBM, and his nine-year tenure as chairman and CEO is often used as a case study in corporate leadership.
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