Aristotle Onassis

Aristotle Onassis was a Greek-Argentine shipping magnate whose 50-year business career produced one of the defining 20th-century international shipping empires — producing his mid-20th-century Greek-Argentine billionaire public profile and his marriages to opera soprano Maria Callas and former U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. He was born Aristotle Socrates Onassis on January 20, 1906, in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire (modern İzmir, Turkey), into a Greek-Anatolian merchant family. His father Socrates Onassis was a Smyrna tobacco-and-textile merchant and his mother Penelope Dologlou was a homemaker.

His September 1922 escape from the burning of Smyrna — during the Greek-Turkish War-ending Great Fire of Smyrna — and his subsequent 1923 emigration via Constantinople (Istanbul) and Athens to Buenos Aires, Argentina, launched his early-career Argentine business career. His 1923 Buenos Aires arrival at age 17 with $60 in his pocket and his subsequent 1923–1925 Argentine telephone-company manual-laborer work shaped his early-career trajectory. His 1925 Buenos Aires tobacco-import business — launched on his Smyrna-tobacco family connections — produced his early-career commercial success and his 1932 Argentine citizenship.

His 1932 first ship purchase — six surplus Canadian National Steamship Company freighter ships at Depression-era distressed prices — launched his subsequent 1930s and 1940s international shipping career. His 1946 marriage to Athina Mary "Tina" Livanos (the daughter of Greek shipping rival Stavros Livanos) launched his post-World-War-II international shipping expansion across the late 1940s and 1950s.

His 1953 acquisition of Société des Bains de Mer (the Monte Carlo casino-and-real-estate operator that controlled approximately 30% of the Monaco principality real estate) launched his subsequent Monaco-residency period across the 1950s and 1960s. His 1959–1968 affair with American opera soprano Maria Callas and his subsequent October 20, 1968 marriage to former U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy on his Greek private island Skorpios produced his later international public profile. He died on March 15, 1975, at age 69, at the Hôpital Necker in Paris, of myasthenia gravis complications.

His name Aristotle derives from the Greek Aristotelēs meaning "the best purpose" — the name of the ancient Greek philosopher (384–322 BC). Aristotle has been a rare but enduring boys' name across Greek-tradition American naming.