Onassis's brother-in-law who surpassed him in fortune

When we talk about billionaires of Greek origin, we often think of the legendary Aristotelis Onassis, the shipping magnate whose life was picture-perfect, including a relationship with singer Maria Callas and a marriage to JFK's widow. But despite his fame, everything seems to indicate that Onassis wasn't the richest magnate of his time, a place that belonged to Stavros Niarchos, curiously his brother-in-law. We'll learn the reason for this family connection later.

When Stavros Spyrou Niarchos was born in Athens at the beginning of the 20th century, his parents had just returned from an American adventure that had earned them a considerable amount of money, allowing young Niarchos to study at the best schools in both Greece and the United States. But the prosperity was short-lived, as his father lost a fortune speculating on the stock market, and the family suffered a sudden decline in status.

His first contact with the shipping world came while working in his uncle's grain trading company, which ended up having its own fleet, precisely at his initiative. They took advantage of the economic situation of the Great Depression to acquire their first six ships at a bargain price. In the late 1930s, Niarchos kept one of the vessels, which, with the outbreak of World War II—where he served as a naval officer—was ceded to the Greek Navy, and which ended up at the bottom of the sea. After the war, he collected a significant compensation from the insurance policy on the sunken ship and was able to restart his maritime business.

In 1947, he married Eugenia Livanos, who was no stranger to the country's leading shipowner, Stavros Livanos. This marriage made him brother-in-law to Onassis, who had married another of the magnate's daughters a year earlier, hence the relationship we've been discussing since the beginning. The boom times that followed the war pushed him to build larger ships than those that existed until then, a fleet that he dedicated almost exclusively to transporting oil. A feverish race to achieve the maximum possible cargo capacity, in which Onassis, the American Daniel K. Ludwig, and Niarchos himself participated, allowed for unsuspected advances, to the point that between 1951 and 1962, the capacity of the largest ship in the world tripled. Some of these super-ships were built by Vickers, the arms company that had made Basil Zaharoff rich.

In 1970, Niarchos was once again in the headlines, but this time not for his business dealings, but for a tragic and also very confusing event. One spring night of that year, his wife Eugenia Livanos died under mysterious circumstances, and some fingers were immediately pointed in his direction. It should be noted that the two had divorced five years earlier, and Niarchos had immediately married Charlotte Ford, the great-granddaughter of the car factory's founder and thirty-two years his junior. But the union was short-lived, and Niarchos and Livanos returned. Revisiting the events of the spring of 1970, investigators had many doubts about the cause of death, to the point that the prosecutor requested the tycoon's prosecution. Finally, in September of that year, a court dismissed the case as suicide. Incidentally, Livanos and Ford would not be Niarchos' last marriages, because shortly after the events we have just recounted, he married none other than Tina Livanos, who was Eugenia's sister and Onassis's ex-wife.

Returning to the business world, in 1969 the immense power of the shipping companies was revealed when a dispute over a refinery between our protagonist and his rival Onassis ended up causing a major government crisis in Greece. Incidentally, shortly before these events, during the previous winter, Niarchos suffered an accident in St. Moritz and for treatment he had Dr. Trueta, a world-famous Catalan doctor, brought over on his private plane.

From 1991 onwards, his health began to deteriorate, to the point that the last five years of his life were spent between doctors in Switzerland and Austria. Before his decline, one of the last social events he attended was billionaire Malcolm S. Forbes's seventieth birthday party in Tangier, where he met many of the world's elite, including an American businessman named Donald Trump.