Sam Zell

Sam Zell was born in Chicago in 1941 to parents who had escaped Poland during World War II, and he attended the University of Michigan where he launched his first business managing student apartments while an undergraduate. After earning a BA and a JD from the University of Michigan, he continued building his property management and investment activities, which became the foundation of his career. In 1968, Zell founded the private investment firm Equity Group Investments (EGI), and with partner Robert H. Lurie he expanded into large-scale residential and commercial property investments that helped create today’s public REIT industry. Over subsequent decades Zell sponsored and led multiple public companies—most notably Equity Residential and Equity Office Properties Trust—and he broadened EGI’s portfolio into manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, media, and international real estate through Equity International. Zell engineered one of the largest leveraged buyouts of the 2000s when Equity Office was sold to Blackstone for roughly $39 billion in 2007, and later that year he led a successful bid to take the Tribune Company private, becoming its chairman and CEO before the company filed for bankruptcy in 2008 amid the recession and heavy debt load. Throughout his life Zell was a notable philanthropist focused on entrepreneurship and education, endowing programs such as the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan, the Zell Fellows Program at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, and other Zell-branded entrepreneurship centers and fellowships internationally.