Metro Group Founder: Otto Beisheim3 photos
Otto Beisheim is the founder of the Metro Group, which owns supermarkets such as Metro, Kaufhof, Media Markt, Saturn, Praktiker, Real, and Extra. He is one of Europe's wealthiest people, with a estimated fortune of $5 billion as of March 2008. Otto Beisheim remains one of the most mysterious figures in German business. Despite being a multimillionaire, he has never given any interviews! In his youth, he did not complete high school and began his career as a salesperson in a leather goods store. One of the facts about his life that arouses strong emotions is that he served in one of the elite units of the SS, the Leibstandarte “Adolf Hitler,” which enjoyed the personal favor of the Führer. In the early 1930s, members of this unit took a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler and acted as his personal guards. Perhaps this experience explains his extreme secrecy. Otto began building his Metro business empire in the 1960s. Today, it is the fifth-largest retail chain in the world, encompassing supermarkets like Metro, Kaufhof, Media Markt, Saturn, Praktiker, Real, and Extra. Beisheim, who primarily lives in Switzerland and the United States, rarely appears in public. He was even absent during his company's initial public offering in 1995 when its shares were listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. He followed this same pattern of secrecy during the opening of the Beisheim-Center in Berlin in 2004.
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