American businessman and millionaire, one of the wealthiest men in America. He is the CEO of MacAdnrews and Forbes, a holding company for such diverse companies as Revlon, Marvel Entertainment, and Consolidated Cigar Corporation.
Notoriously media-shy, Perelman, the man, is known primarily through his business dealings. Testimony in a lawsuit brought by a senior manager for wrongful dismissal reveals that Perelman needs to be “hero-worshipped” and that he regales his senior management team with stories of sexual conquests. He appeared heartless when in 1995, he told the plaintiff in the case, his former Chief Financial Officer, to institutionalize his Alzheimer’s Disease-stricken wife instead of trying to care for her at home with added instructions not to look sad because the bankers would worry. New York’s Daily News has dubbed Perelman the king of mean.
A shrewd businessman, he earned the title “corporate raider” in the 80s and 90s when his strategy seemed to consist of buying businesses with diverse product lines, dumping the majority of units to pay off the debt that he has never been hesitant to incur, and expanding the core business, ultimately selling if off for a huge profit. In a book entitled “Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire And Both Lost!!!” by journalist Dan Raviv, Perelman is compared to a comic book supervillain. His business strategy for that company included driving it into bankruptcy to prevent Carl Icahn, another reputed corporate raider, from gaining control, and then building it back up again, in part by sale of action figures based on its successful comic book characters like Spider-Man. He bought Revlon in 1986, which he called the “largest entrepreneurially managed hostile takeover to date.”
Growing up in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, Perelman attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, earning his MBA in 1966. In 1965, he married Faith Golding, a wealthy New Yorker whom he had met on a cruise to Israel. Perelman attributes his business acumen to his father, a successful Philadelphia businessman, with whom he worked until the mid 70s when the urge to strike off on his own hit him, causing a several-year rift between father and son. Ron moved his family to New York in 1978; his 18-year 1st marriage yielded 4 children and a bitter divorce that did not stop him from marrying three more times.
On 1/28/00, he married sultry actress Ellen Barkin in a traditional Jewish ceremony. Perelman has six children from his previous marriages, and Barkin, married first to actor Gabriel Byrne, has two. His marriage to Barkin ended six years later in February 2006 when he surprised her with divorce papers and had security guards watch her as she left their Manhattan townhouse.
Link to Wikipedia biography