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 Wallis
Company: Advance Publications/
Condé Nast
Title: CEO and Chairman
Age: 80
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?’ ”
Company: Speedway Motorsports and Sonic Automotive
Title: Chairman and CEO
Age: 80
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.
Company: Cablevision Systems Corporation
Title: Chairman of the Board/Director
Age: 81
“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.
Company: MannKind Corporation
Title: CEO/Chairman of the Board
Age: 82
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.
Company: The Kuok Group
Title: Founder
Age: 84
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.”
Company: Viacom/CBS
Title: Chairman of the Board
Age: 84
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.
Company: Haribo
Title: Joint Managing Director
Age: 85
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.”
Company: Tracinda Corporation
Title: President/CEO
Age: 90
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.