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8 Over 80 At an age when many executives settle into retirement — or into the grave — these successful business leaders prove that oldies can indeed be goodies. By: David WallisSpring 2008 , Page 57 1. S.I. Newhouse Jr.
Company: Advance Publications/
Condé Nast Every holiday season, New York gossip columnists pore over the seating chart of Condé Nast’s annual Christmas lunch. Proximity to the press-shy press baron Newhouse serves as a career barometer, gauging whether an editor or an ad executive at the publishing company behind Vanity Fair and Vogue is in or out. “He is really, really hands-on,” says Carol Felsenthal, author of Citizen Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant, who says Newhouse makes time to read his magazines and competing publications thoroughly. “He would ask, ‘Why does Esquire get a full-page ad and GQ got only a quarter-page?’ ” 2. O. Bruton Smith
Company: Speedway Motorsports and Sonic Automotive Though he took the checkered flag as a teenage race-car driver in North Carolina, Smith had the brakes applied to his nascent career . . . by his mother. “She had been asking me not to race, and then she started fighting dirty — she started praying I would stop. You can’t fight your mom and God, so I stopped driving,” Smith once wrote on the blog Fast Machines. Despite leaving the driver’s seat, Smith still helped shape the sport: He owns six tracks and receives widespread credit for attracting women to Nascar by sprucing up speedways. 3. Charles F. Dolan
Company: Cablevision Systems Corporation “Chuck” Dolan once confessed to the New York Times that he didn’t consider himself a “sterling administrator.” Nevertheless, he built Cablevision into the nation’s fifth-largest cable company. It also owns American Movie Classics, the Independent Film Channel and Madison Square Garden. What keeps Dolan from tuning out? Well, perhaps the bungling of his heir apparent: Son James Dolan’s oversight of Cablevision’s New York Knicks has been woeful, capped by a very public sexual-harassment lawsuit filed by a Garden executive against the team and its president, Isiah Thomas — reportedy infuriating the famously courtly Dolan senior. 4. Alfred E. Mann
Company: MannKind Corporation Describing Mann as a living legend is far from hyperbole. A physicist, he founded more than a dozen companies, including Pacesetter Systems, which manufactured the first rechargeable pacemaker, and MiniMed, a producer of implantable insulin pumps. His latest venture, medical-device specialist MannKind Corporation, aims to create a cancer vaccine. Mann, who sold lemonade during the Great Depression, reportedly works 80- to 90-hour weeks. 5. Robert Kuok
Company: The Kuok Group Malaysian magnate Kuok “retired” some years ago, but the richest man in Southeast Asia hardly whiles away his days by the pool. Kuok, whose holdings include a shipping company, Coca-Cola bottling plants, the South China Morning Post and Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, reportedly presides over his firm’s steering committee. As Michael Backman and Charlotte Butler point out in their book Big in Asia: 25 Strategies for Business Success, “Deference to age means that the old patriarch still exerts great influence. In one sense, they never retire — the culture . . . prohibits it.” 6. Sumner Redstone
Company: Viacom/CBS To maintain his vigor, every day Redstone swigs a “miracle drug” — an elixir called MonaVie, made from the Brazilian açaí berry. But judging by his business decisions, something else does an even better job of keeping Redstone in the pink: Rupert Murdoch. Redstone has long battled Murdoch, 77, for the title of biggest (and oldest) media titan. In 2006, for instance, Redstone fired his protégé, Tom Freston, because he allowed Murdoch to snap up MySpace. 7. Hans Riegel Jr.
Company: Haribo In addition to gobbling up competing candy companies to expand the international confectionery empire started by his father, Haribo co-owner Riegel devotes time to paging through comic books and grooving to techno music. “I love kids and enjoy watching them,” says the man who popularized Gummi Bears. “They are my customers. I have to know what sweets they enjoy, what they think, what language they speak.” 8. Kirk Kerkorian
Company: Tracinda Corporation Having amassed an $18 billion fortune, Kerkorian is proof that a high-school diploma is an overvalued asset. In fact, the country’s seventh-richest man did not complete junior high, dropping out at age 13. But he has schooled many of his more-educated adversaries, winning auto, airline, movie and gaming jackpots. A key to his management style: finding great executives and staying out of their way. He owns the majority of MGM Mirage, and recently considered doubling down by investing even more in the casino giant.
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