Stavros Niarchos was born on July 3, 1909 in Piraeus, and by the 1960s he controlled a private fleet equal to half the e...

Stavros Niarchos was born on July 3, 1909 in Piraeus, and by the 1960s he controlled a private fleet equal to half the entire merchant navy of France. The path from that starting point to that destination is one of the more remarkable business stories of the 20th century. His father Spyros had emigrated to the United States, returned to Greece with 100,000 drachmas, and partnered with the Koumandaros brothers to build the Evrotas flour mill. When Spyros lost everything on the stock exchange in 1923, young Stavros had to abandon private school, eventually drop out of law school, and go to work as a clerk at his uncles' mill. That job turned out to be the opening he needed. Niarchos quietly founded a transport company using borrowed money, then persuaded his uncles it would be cheaper to use a single carrier for their flour shipments, and won the contract without them ever knowing he owned the company. The scheme revealed something he would act on for the rest of his life: the real money was not in making or selling things, but in moving them. In 1938 he borrowed again to buy an old cargo ship called the Maleas, insured it for reportedly ten times its value, and opened a New York office. When German forces sank the Maleas during World War II, he collected the insurance and bought four freighters. He served as an officer in the Royal Navy during the war, then emerged into the postwar shipping boom with extraordinary timing. The United States was selling Liberty ships on highly favorable terms. Niarchos acquired 16 of them and never looked back. By 1957 he had 70 ships. He moved heavily into oil tankers as postwar economies became dependent on petroleum, built one of the world's largest private fleets, appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and purchased the private island of Spetsopoula in the Saronic Gulf that same year. His rivalry with Aristotle Onassis defined an era in Greek shipping. A tribute published in Oikonomikos Tachydromos shortly after his death in April 1996 called him one of the last true self-made titans, a man who rose through adversity with nothing but nerve and intelligence. #GreekShipping #StavrosNiarchos #Greece