Background
Weill was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, USA, on March 16, 1933. His parents were immigrants of Polish-Jewish origin.
Weill's middle initial of "I" is not an abbreviation for anything.
Weill was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, USA, on March 16, 1933. His parents were immigrants of Polish-Jewish origin.
Weill's middle initial of "I" is not an abbreviation for anything.
Sanford Weill was active in the Air Force ROTC and the Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity while studying at Cornell University.
Sanford Weill went to work as a $35-a-week runner for the New York stockbrokers Bear Stearns in 1955. He quickly moved to work in the office and became a broker himself. He had found a career.In 1960, while still in his twenties, Weill and three partners started a small brokerage: Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill. Over the next 20 years, Weill led the brokerage through 15 acquisitions, building it into the financial powerhouse Shearson, the second largest company in the securities industry. He sold Shearson to American Express in 1981 for $930 million. Weill became President of American Express, whose directors specifically hoped he would be able to turn around their failing insurance operation, Fireman's Fund. Although Weill succeeded in this goal, he became frustrated with the corporate culture at American Express and attempted unsuccessfully to buy Fireman's for himself. In 1985, he resigned from American Express.
At age 53, Weill, although wealthy, was out of work and thwarted in his efforts to find a job. In 1986 he traveled to Minneapolis to persuade Control Data to spin off its subsidiary, Commercial Credit, in an IPO (initial public offering) worth $850 million. Control Data sold 82 percent of the company to the public, Weill took over as CEO, investing $7 million of his own money. Besides Commercial Credit's lending operation, Weill had acquired its subsidiary, a property and casualty insurance company called Gulf Insurance.
By 1988, Weill and his team had turned Commercial Credit around and acquired Primerica Corp., for $1.5 billion, along with its holdings, the brokerage Smith Barney and the A.L. Williams insurance company, which Weill renamed Primerica Financial Services (PFS). The whole conglomerate of brokerage, commercial credit, and insurance operations would continue under the name Primerica Corp. Over the next two years, Weill's Primerica Corp. absorbed the consumer lending operations of Barclays American/Financial, and acquired receivables and branches from Landmark Financial Services. In 1992 alone, Primerica raised $625 million by selling non-strategic assets. Weill made a decisive move, buying 27 percent of Travelers Insurance for $722.5 million. Sanford Weill earned $67.6 million that year, most of it from stock options. He was the second highest-paid executive in America.
The following year, he succeeded in realizing a cherished dream. He regained control of Shearson, buying his old firm back from American Express for $1.2 billion. He acquired Shearson's 8400 brokers and state-of-the-art back office, while leaving behind Shearson's litigation liability. With Shearson under its belt, Weill's Primerica purchased the remaining shares of Travelers with $4 billion in stock. Weill merged Shearson with Smith Barney, retaining the formidable Shearson office facilities, and closing Smith Barney's. Travelers Group, as the resulting parent company was called, included brokerage, term insurance, consumer finance, property-casualty insurance, life insurance, money management and investment banking operations.
In 1996, Weill acquired the property and casualty operations of the insurance provider Aetna for $4 billion. The insurance companies were reorganized into separate life, term, and property-casualty operations. Smith Barney Shearson played a major role in financing the merger of Viacom Inc. with Paramount Communications. Travelers' 1996 profits made it number 32 of the Fortune 500 list of America's most successful companies. The original shares of Commercial Credit appreciated tenfold in the decade after Weill bought them.
Throughout his career, Sanford Weill ran his businesses like an owner. He avoided consultants and got to know his company by getting to know people at all levels of the business. All of Travelers' employees were encouraged to own stock in the company. Senior managers received up to 25 percent of their pay in stock, which they were not allowed to sell for two years.
In September 1997, Travelers paid $9.1 billion in stock to acquire Salomon, Inc., the parent company of the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Weill merged Salomon with Smith Barney to create the second largest securities firm in the world. In April 1998, Weill announced the biggest coup of all: Travelers Group would merge with Citicorp, the parent company of Citibank, to create Citigroup, Inc. At the time, Citicorp was the world's largest supplier of credit cards, and Citibank was the second largest bank in the United States. On the morning the planned merger was announced, the two companies were valued at about $70.6 billion. By the end of the day, the value of their combined stock had jumped to $83.6 billion.
Weill had already overcome significant regulatory hurdles to merge his insurance businesses with investment banks and brokerages, but the merger of Travelers with Citibank faced a seemingly insurmountable legal obstacle: the 1933 Glass-Steagall Banking Act, which strictly separated investment banks and commercial banks. In the 1980s, banks and insurance companies had won limited regulatory waivers from the Glass-Steagall restrictions, and many in the financial services industry called for their complete repeal. Weill and Citicorp Chairman John S. Reed decided to force the issue. They went ahead with their plan and secured a waiver whereby the temporary merger of the companies would be permitted, pending congressional action. Weill recruited former President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a Democrat, to serve on the board of the merged companies and assist them in making their case to Congress.
In 1999, both houses of Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act by overwhelming margins, and President Clinton signed the act into law. The measure won bipartisan support by reforming certain discriminatory banking practices, such as the "redlining" of low-income neighborhoods, while repealing the Glass-Steagall restrictions on the intermingling of commercial banks and investment banks, and of banks with insurance companies. Gramm-Leach-Bliley permitted the completion of the Citigroup merger, and set off a wave of similar combinations in the financial services industry.
Few considered this possibility in 1999, as Citigroup became the largest financial services company in the world, with 100 million customers in 100 countries. At first, Sanford Weill served as Co-Chairman and Co-CEO with John Reed, but in 2000 Weill became the sole Chairman and CEO of Citigroup. Under Weill's leadership, Citigroup achieved unprecedented growth, earning $13 billion in 2001. New subsidiaries were acquired or created all over the world, particularly in Asia and the newly liberated economies of Eastern Europe. Weill stepped aside as CEO in 2003 and retired from the Chairmanship in 2006.
Sanford Weill was the first Chief Executive Officer of Citigroup together with John Reed.
With regard to his philantropic activity, Weill served as a Cornell Trustee for many years, and in 1998 he endowed Cornell's medical school, now known as the Weill Cornell Medical College. As chairman of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College and an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University, Weill orchestrated a $400 million donation to Cornell, of which he and his wife personally contributed $250 million. In June 2007, he endowed the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at Cornell, housed in a new life science building named Weill Hall.
He is currently the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Academy Foundation, a non-profit he founded in 1982. NAF supports career-themed academies in the areas of finance, hospitality and tourism, information technology and engineering in over 500 high schools across the United States.
In 2012, Weill was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
