Lessons From An Extravagant Life — A Biography on Aristotle Onassis
I recently finished reading “An Extravagant Life” by Frank Brady. It’s a biography written about Greek businessman and entrepreneur Aristotle Onassis.
This is, without a doubt, one of the best business biographies I have read in a long time. Onassis was a force of nature, achieving massive success in multiple endeavours. He was also a fascinating and colourful character, although a deeply flawed one.
A Brief Overview of an Extravagant Life Of Aristotle Onassis
The book starts in Smyrna, which is now Turkey but was then Greece, with Onassis as a boy. He was part of a fairly wealthy and influential family, and his father was a prominent businessman in the tobacco industry.
Onassis is a typical teenager, experimenting with alcohol and girls while studying when tragedy strikes. As part of a conflict, the Turkish army enters Smyrna and massacres many of the city’s inhabitants, burning much of it to the ground.
Onassis’ father is imprisoned, and the young Onassis uses a substantial amount of the family fortune to get him out. Rather than being grateful, his father admonishes him, accusing him of being careless with money and reprimanding him for being so wasteful.
It’s at this point that Onassis flips, and a drive that I believe was responsible for much of his success develops: proving his father wrong and outdoing him in business. Later in the book, the biographer reveals that Onassis told a friend that his father living to see him become the head of the family was one of the greatest joys of his life.
Aristotle Onassis Goes to Argentina
Onassis decides to leave Smyrna and goes by boat to Argentina. Once there, he works briefly in a kitchen before getting a job in a telecommunications company. We see here that he works lots of overtime and is driven from the outset.
Using savings from this job, Onassis begins to import tobacco, and after some initial setbacks, he has huge success. He becomes a millionaire in his early twenties.
Onassis Gets Into Shipping
After a while, Onassis gets into shipping. This will be the industry in which he makes his real fortune. During the World War II years, Onassis became uber-wealthy and was so dominant in the shipping industry that only a few players in the world were even in the same league.
Shipping will be the main business in Onassis’ life, and he’ll make a vast fortune from it, earning him a net worth of $500 million in the mid-seventies.
However, Onassis also gets into various side ventures, including whaling, entertainment, aviation, real estate, investments in the chemical and banking industries, and a few others. All of his business ventures are detailed in the book.
Aristotle Onassis’s Personal Life
Although I’m not very interested in the personal lives of entrepreneurs, this book goes into it, so I’ll give it a brief mention.
Onassis was somewhat of a playboy, was married multiple times, and even admitted to beating his wife, which I found extremely off-putting. He drank heavily and partied with high society, including the Prince of Monaco and an elderly Sir Winston Churchill, and he married Jackie Kennedy a few years after JFK was assassinated.
In his later life, Onassis’ only son died tragically in a plane accident, and he never recovered. He was rarely seen again and basically took to his bed and died a few years after this. He was survived by a daughter, Christina, who died a couple of years later due to a heart attack.
Lessons from Aristotle Onassis
The number one lesson I learned from reading this book was that guts matter. Onassis took several massive gambles when he saw an opportunity, and he pursued them relentlessly. He simply went after every opportunity and drove as hard as he could. Whether the idea of failure ever occurred to him isn’t discussed in the book, but he was extremely confident in any case and pressed hard when he saw an opportunity.
Persistence leads to breaks, and connections matter. When Onassis first went to Argentina, he was turned down repeatedly by tobacco merchants. However, he engineered a meeting in the street with one of the CEOs and, with his recommendation, secured a meeting with the company’s buyer. The same buyer had turned him down before, but with his boss sending Onassis to see him, he was willing to buy, and he made an order for $10,000.
Think outside the box. Onassis didn’t have the money to buy his first oil tanker, but he nonetheless secured a contract to deliver oil. He then used the contract as collateral, borrowing money from a bank to buy the ship. The bank was confident enough to give him such a large sum because they knew he had the contract, and they could take it if he failed to make repayments.
Have a grand vision. Onassis was, ultimately, just a Greek kid from Smyrna, but he never saw himself that way. This man had a global empire, dealt with heads of state, stood before Congress, and his last wife, Jackie Kennedy, said his boat was busier than the White House.
Money isn’t everything. Yes, yes, I know, we all need it, and we all want more of it. That’s why we’re in business. However, Onassis’s personal life was a shambles, and after reading the book, I don’t think he was a very good person. Is a man really a success if he is filthy rich but has multiple failed marriages and smokes and drinks daily? I’m not the judge, but I don’t think putting your business ahead of your marriage, e.g., by leaving your honeymoon to handle a business matter, is a very smart life strategy.
Aristotle Onassis Quotes
At your job, you must be serious, but in life, you must be crazy.
Never start a job, a battle, or a relationship, if the fear of losing overshadows the prospect of success.
The secret in business is knowing something nobody else knows.
After a point, and so on, money stops to matter, it stops being the goal, the game is all that matters.
I don’t have friends or enemies; I have competitors.
To be successful, you have to act big, think big, and talk big.
My law is business is to be the one buying, not selling.
The best deals and the best sex happen outside of boundaries.
Aristotle Onassis Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Was Aristotle Onassis the richest man in the world?
Yes, at one point, he was. He made over $70 million in 1957. That would translate to about $740 million today. While the net worth rankings are always fluctuating, Onassis was the richest man in the world at least some of the time.
Q. Who did Aristotle Onassis leave his fortune to?
Onasiss’ intended heir, his only son, died tragically in an airplane accident when he was in his twenties. Onassis lost the will to live and died soon after. The estate went to his daughter, Christina. She died a few years later, and it passed to her only child, Athina.
Q. Why did Jackie Kennedy marry Aristotle Onassis?
The book makes clear that they had been close for years before they got together. It also makes clear that Jackie Kennedy liked to spend money extravagantly, and she saw Onassis as a source of money, at least to some extent.
For more on this book and the business lessons in it, check out the Founders Podcast episode on an Extravagant Life.
