Ronald Perelman

Ronald Owen Perelman (born January 1, 1943) is an American billionaire investor and businessman serving as chairman and chief executive officer of MacAndrews & Forbes Incorporated, a holding company he wholly owns that invests in and operates businesses across diverse sectors including cosmetics, biotechnology, and military equipment. A graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in 1964 and an MBA in 1966, Perelman built his fortune through aggressive leveraged buyouts starting in the late 1970s, acquiring undervalued companies and restructuring them for profitability.

His most notable acquisition was Revlon in 1985 for $1.74 billion, which he held for decades until losing control amid its 2023 bankruptcy proceedings, reflecting broader challenges in his portfolio exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and leading to asset sales including aircraft, yachts, and art worth billions. Perelman has also engaged in philanthropy, donating over $400 million to causes such as medical research and education, though he faced criticism for failing to fulfill a $65 million pledge to Princeton University. As of recent estimates, his net worth stands around $1.9 billion, down from peaks exceeding $10 billion due to these corporate setbacks.

Ronald Owen Perelman was born on January 1, 1943, in Greensboro, North Carolina, as the first child of Raymond G. Perelman and Ruth Perelman (née Caplan), in a Jewish family. His birth marked him as the first infant delivered in Greensboro that year, amid his parents' recent marriage in 1941.

Perelman's upbringing in a middle-class household supported by his father's entrepreneurial activities fostered practical lessons in risk assessment and opportunity exploitation, rather than narratives of bootstrapped adversity. The family's Jewish heritage influenced cultural norms, though Perelman's later personal observance of Orthodox practices diverged from his parents' more conservative approach. These formative experiences, grounded in familial enterprise rather than isolated hardship, laid causal foundations for his subsequent business acumen without reliance on self-made origin myths.

In 2000, Perelman married actress Ellen Barkin in a ceremony at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue; the union, which produced no children, dissolved in 2006 following allegations of financial mismanagement, culminating in a $60 million settlement to Barkin plus additional litigation over a film production company where Perelman owed her firm approximately $4 million more. His fifth marriage, to Harvard-educated psychiatrist Anna Chapman in October 2010, resulted in a son, Oscar, born in late 2010; the couple remains married as of 2023, with Chapman participating in family-hosted events.