FT: Self-made man who rescued Saatchi & Saatchi

By Simon Kuper

He conducted business meetings unshaven, tieless, smoking a cigar, with his stockinged feet on the table. Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who exuded charisma, died of leukaemia on July 4, aged 63, and could have gone through life as an heir of the family conglomerate.

Instead, the Franco-Swiss entrepreneur made his own fortune, and then another by rescuing Saatchi & Saatchi and Adidas. When he finally returned to the family business, it was as a self-made billionaire. His one failure in business was his football club, Olympique Marseille.

Louis-Dreyfus was born in Paris in 1946 into great wealth. The family business, founded in 1851 by his great-grandfather Leopold, had become a thriving conglomerate dealing largely in cereals, ships and weapons.

But Louis-Dreyfus did not want to be a mere heir. He was always his own man, and for many years a black sheep. He never passed his final school exams, something he liked to recall after graduating from Harvard Business School. He spent time on an Israeli kibbutz, and worked for family businesses in Brazil and the US.

In the early 1980s he joined IMS Health, a small American company that did market research in pharmaceuticals. When Dun & Bradstreet bought it for $1.7bn in 1988, he had made his own fortune. Louis-Dreyfus relaxed on Swiss ski slopes, but got bored. (more)