Theodore Joseph Forstmann was one of the founding partners of Forstmann Little & Corporation, a private equity firm, as well as the chairman and CEO of IMG, a global sport, and media company.
He was born on February 13, 1940, and passed away on November 20, 2011. Forstmann was a Republican and a philanthropist in addition to being a billionaire. He advocated for parental control over their children’s education and contributed to scholarship programs for students from low-income families. He took a group on a tour of refugee camps in the region that was formerly known as Yugoslavia.
Forstmann was the second of a total of six children and was the second child to be born and reared in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was the son of Dorothy (née Mercadante) and Julius Forstmann, who had a wool firm that went bankrupt in 1958. Dorothy Forstmann was his mother, and Julius Forstmann was his father.
Julius Forstmann had inherited the Forstmann Woolen Company from his own father, one of the wealthiest American industrialists at the time. The Forstmann family tree had both German and Italian descendants.
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Both Greenwich Country Day School and Phillips Academy gave him their diplomas upon completion of their respective programs. After that, he attended Yale University and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. While there, he participated in ice hockey as a goaltender for the Yale Bulldogs.
In later years, Forstmann pursued his legal education at Columbia Law School, where he graduated with a Juris Doctor degree. He used the money he made from gambling to pay for his education.
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Theodore J. Forstmann Children: Everest Forstmann, Siya Forstmann
Forstmann never tied the knot, but in the 1990s, after finding Everest and Siya at an orphanage in South Africa, he took them in as his own children and raised them as his own.
