Mitchell Rales | |
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Born | August 1956 (age 67–68) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Education | Miami University (1978) |
Occupations | |
Known for | Co-founding Danaher and Glenstone |
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Board member of |
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Spouses |
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Children | 2 |
Family | Steven Rales (brother) |
Mitchell P. Rales (born August 1956) is an American businessman and art collector. He co-founded Danaher Corporation with his brother Steven Rales in 1984 and the art museum Glenstone with his wife Emily Wei in 2006. Rales is also the chairman of ESAB, president of the National Gallery of Art, and the top limited partner of the Washington Commanders of the National Football League (NFL). His net worth was estimated by Forbes in mid-2024 to be $4.8 billion.
Rales was born in August 1956 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. He graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1974, where he was captain of their football and baseball teams. [1] [2] [3] [4] Rales earned a degree in business administration at Miami University in 1978 and was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. [5]
In 1979, Rales left his father's real estate firm to found Equity Group Holdings with his brother, Steven Rales. Using junk bonds, they bought a diversified line of businesses. In 1978, they changed the name to Diversified Mortgage Investors and then to Danaher in 1984. [6] In the 1980s, the AM side of radio station WGMS was sold off to Rales, who converted it WTEM, a sports-talk station, in 1992. In 1988, he made a takeover bid of Interco, which was the largest manufacturer of furniture and men's shoes in the U.S. at the time. [7] [8] He later ended the bid after five months with a profit of $60 million. [9]
In 1995, Rales and his brother founded Colfax Corporation, an industrial pumps manufacturer later rebranded as Enovis in 2022. [10] He is a majority shareholder of Fortive, which split off from Danaher in 2016, and served on their board of directors until June 2021. [6] [11] In 2017, Rales paid a fine of $720,000 to the Federal Trade Commission after inadvertently reporting purchases of shares in Colfax and Danaher were not above the filing threshold, which violated the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act. [12] He had previously been fined $850,000 by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1991 for violating the same act after buying Interco. [13]
In July 2023, Rales became the top limited partner in a group headed by Josh Harris that acquired the National Football League (NFL) team Washington Commanders for $6.05 billion, the highest ever for a sports team. [14] [15] He considered the opportunity to be "humbling", as he grew up a fan of the team and frequently attended home games at RFK Stadium. [16]
In 2006, Rales and his wife Emily Wei Rales established the art museum Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland. [17] [18] Rales had owned the land since 1986 and had previously made it his residence. [19] Glenstone displays the Rales's collection of post-World War II art, including paintings, sculptures, and both indoor and outdoor installations, and also functions as his personal residence. [20] [21] In 2018, Glenstone finished a $219 million expansion which increased both the gallery space and the wooded land surrounding the galleries. [22] Rales donated $1.9 billion to the Glenstone Foundation in 2021, increasing the museum's asset value to $4.6 billion, nearly the same as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. [21] The museum is free to visit via online booking. [23] [24]
Rales is Jewish and is one of four sons (Joshua, Steven, and Stewart) of Norman and Ruth Rales (née Abramson). [25] [26] Norman was raised in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York and later became a successful businessman, who sold his building supply company in Washington, D.C. to his employees in what was the first employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) transaction in American history. Norman was also a philanthropist, having founded the Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation and the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service. [25] In 1988, he took a fishing trip in Russia and nearly died after their helicopter crashed. [19]
Rales has been married twice. He and his first wife, Lyn Goldthorp Rales, had two children before a divorce in 1999. [27] He married his second wife, Emily Wei, in 2008. [22] [28] [3] He lives in Potomac, Maryland. [29] Rales is the president of the National Gallery of Art and serves as chairman of the board of ESAB. [30] He is also a former board member of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and retired as chair of Enovis in 2023. [30] [31] The same year, he was elected as a member of the Business, Corporate, and Philanthropic Leadership class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [32] Rales signed The Giving Pledge in 2019, with his net worth being estimated by Forbes in June 2024 to be $4.8 billion. [29] [33]
The Quiet Man is a 1952 American romantic comedy-drama film directed and produced by John Ford, and starring John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Victor McLaglen, Barry Fitzgerald, and Ward Bond. The screenplay by Frank S. Nugent was based on a 1933 Saturday Evening Post short story of the same name by Irish author Maurice Walsh, later published as part of a collection titled The Green Rushes. The film features Winton Hoch's lush photography of the Irish countryside and a long, climactic, semi-comic fist fight.
The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
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The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University.
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Danaher Corporation is an American global conglomerate founded in 1984 by brothers Steven and Mitchell Rales. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the company designs, manufactures, and markets medical, industrial, and commercial products and services. Danaher was among the first companies in North America to adopt Kaizen principles, a Japanese lean manufacturing philosophy of continuous improvement and efficiency. The company held $78.5 billion in assets as of 2024.
Arthur Mitchell Sackler was an American psychiatrist and marketer of pharmaceuticals whose fortune originated in medical advertising and trade publications. He was also an art collector. He was one of the three patriarchs of the controversial Sackler family pharmaceutical dynasty.
Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.
Raymond Sackler was an American physician and businessman. He acquired Purdue Pharma together with his brothers Arthur M. Sackler and Mortimer Sackler. Purdue Pharma is the developer of OxyContin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic in the United States.
Robert Rosenkranz is an American philanthropist and the chairman of Delphi Capital Management, an investment concern with over $35 billion in assets under management, and the founder of a group of investment and private equity partnerships. From 1987 until 2018 he was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Delphi Financial Group, an insurance company with more than $20 billion in assets. Delphi grew from one of his acquisitions and increased its value 100-fold under his leadership.
Fred Sandback was an American minimalist conceptual-based sculptor known for his yarn sculptures, drawings, and prints. His estate is represented by David Zwirner.
Steven M. Rales is an American businessman and film producer. He founded Danaher Corporation with his brother Mitchell Rales in 1984 and is chairman of the board. Rales also founded the film production company Indian Paintbrush in 2006, which works closely with filmmaker Wes Anderson. His work with Anderson has earned him three Academy Award nominations, winning Best Live Action Short Film for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023). Rales also owns the media distribution companies Janus Films and The Criterion Collection and owns a 20% stake in the National Basketball Association (NBA) team Indiana Pacers.
Furniture Brands International, Inc. was a home furnishings company, headquartered in Clayton, Missouri. The company began in 1911 as International Shoe Company with the merger of Roberts, Johnson & Rand Shoe Company and Peters Shoe Company. In 1966, the company changed its name to Interco as the result of diversification, and once the company exited the shoe business, adopted the name Furniture Brands International. Some of the brands it owned in the furniture industry included Broyhill, Thomasville, Drexel Heritage, Henredon, Hickory Chair, Pearson, Laneventure, and Maitland-Smith. In 2013, Furniture Brands filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced plans to sell most of its divisions. New owner KPS Capital Partners announced the formation of Heritage Home Group on November 25 of that year.
Alejandro Santo Domingo is a Colombian-American businessman. He manages the Santo Domingo Group, his family's conglomerate, with his net worth estimated by Forbes to be US$2.6 billion as of May 2023. He is a board member of several companies and organizations, such as Bavaria Brewery, Caracol Televisión, El Espectador, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Barefoot Foundation. Santo Domingo also owns a minority stake in the Washington Commanders of the National Football League (NFL). He is married to British socialite Lady Charlotte Wellesley.
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Enovis is a medical technology company with a focus in orthopedics. The company was founded by brothers Mitchell and Steven Rales as the Colfax Corporation in 1995. Enovis is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware and is listed on the NYSE as ENOV. The company has over 5,000 employees operating at 12 sites around the world.
Fortive Corporation is an American industrial technology conglomerate company headquartered in Everett, Washington. The company specializes in providing essential technologies for connected workflow solutions; designing, developing, manufacturing and distributing professional and engineered products, software and services. Their products and services are split into three strategic segments; Intelligent Operating Solutions, Precision Technologies, and Advanced Healthcare Solutions. As of December 2022, Fortive has over 18,000 employees in 60 countries worldwide.
Glenstone is a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland, founded in 2006 by American billionaire Mitchell Rales and his wife, Emily Wei Rales. The museum's exhibitions are drawn from a collection of about 1,300 works from post-World War II artists around the world. It is the largest private contemporary art museum in the United States, holding more than $4.6 billion in net assets, and is noted for its setting in a broad natural landscape.
Emily Wei Rales is a Canadian-American art curator and historian. She is the director of Glenstone, an art museum in Potomac, Maryland, which she founded along with her husband, the American businessman Mitchell Rales.
The 2023 season was the Washington Commanders' 92nd season in the National Football League (NFL) and their fourth and final under head coach Ron Rivera. It was the first season under owner Josh Harris, who headed a group in the offseason that bought the franchise from Daniel Snyder for $6.05 billion.
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