Onassis, Aristotle Socrates, << oh NAS ihs, AR ih stot uhl SOK ruh teez >> (1905?-1975), a Greek businessman, was for many years one of the world’s wealthiest people. His private life was noteworthy as well, particularly his lengthy relationship with opera diva Maria Callas and his marriage in 1968 to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the widow of United States President John F. Kennedy.
Onassis, the son of a well-to-do tobacco importer, was born in the Ottoman Empire, in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey). His date of birth is uncertain. One modern biographer calculated his date of birth as Jan. 20, 1904, based in part on the ages of his schoolmates, but Onassis used other dates, including Sept. 21, 1900, and Jan. 20, 1906. In Smyrna, during the war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire (1920-1922), Onassis claimed to be younger than he was to avoid detention in a concentration camp. Later, he gave an age older than he actually was to obtain work more easily. His birth records were destroyed during the war, so his actual birth date is not known.
The Onassis family lost most of its fortune in the war. In 1923, Aristotle Onassis was sent to Argentina to attempt to improve his family’s finances. Onassis entered the tobacco-importing business in Argentina and soon diversified into other sectors of the tobacco industry. He was already wealthy by the time he entered the shipping business in the early 1930’s. Over the next four decades, he created a shipping empire, which included large freighters and shippers, and he moved aggressively into the real estate business and airline industry. Through a concession from the Greek government, he was the owner and operator of Olympic Airways, the Greek national airline, between 1957 and 1974. Onassis was worth more than $500 million at the time of his death, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, on March 15, 1975.
