Aristotle Onassis

Aristotle Onassis was a Greek shipping magnate, born to a Greek family in Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire, who built one of the largest privately owned merchant shipping fleets in the world across the middle decades of the twentieth century, beginning with a small number of secondhand freighters bought during the Great Depression when ship prices were unusually low. He became one of the pioneers of the modern supertanker, commissioning larger oil tankers than had previously been common in order to cut the cost of moving crude oil in bulk, a strategy that helped reshape the economics of the global oil shipping industry in the postwar decades. His flamboyant personal life kept him almost constantly in the international press, including a long relationship with opera singer Maria Callas and, in 1968, his marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of assassinated United States president John F. Kennedy, a union that made him one of the most publicly recognized businessmen in the world at the time. Onassis also built the airline Olympic Airways into Greece's national carrier after acquiring it from the Greek government in the 1950s, and by the time of his death in 1975 he was widely regarded as one of the wealthiest and most famous shipowners of the century.