Leonard Lauder, billionaire scion of cosmetics empire, dies at 92

[WASHINGTON] Leonard Lauder, who built Estee Lauder into one of the world’s biggest cosmetics makers and catapulted himself into the top echelon of wealthiest New Yorkers, has died. He was 92.

Lauder died on Saturday (Jun 14) surrounded by family, according to a statement by Estee Lauder.

In almost 40 years running the New York-based company founded by his parents, Lauder oversaw the launch or acquisition of such brands as Clinique, Aveda, MAC Cosmetics, Tom Ford Beauty, Bobbi Brown, Jo Malone London and La Mer. He took the company public in 1995, and its share price rose 33 per cent on the first day of trading.

One of Lauder’s quirkier creations was the notion that lipstick sales can serve as a countercyclical economic indicator, because women turn to inexpensive cosmetics when they cannot afford clothing and other bigger-ticket luxuries.

When Lauder joined the family company in 1958, annual revenue was about US$800,000, he said. In 2009, the year he stepped down as chairman, it topped US$7.3 billion.

Lauder’s net worth was tied closely to his ownership of more than 80 million shares in the company. He was worth an estimated US$26.2 billion in March 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As at June 2025, following a prolonged slump in the share price, his net worth was an estimated US$15.6 billion.

His younger brother, Ronald Lauder, ran overseas operations before becoming chairman of the company’s Clinique Laboratories division in 1994. He was US ambassador to Austria in 1986-1987 and sought the Republican nomination for New York City mayor in 1989, losing to Rudolph Giuliani.

Secret to success

The company sells more than 25 brands of face creams, makeup, perfumes and shampoos in more than 150 countries. One secret to success, Lauder told an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2004, was keeping the brands separate from Estee Lauder and in competition with one another, creating a dynamic of what he called “sibling rivalry”.

Another key, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2020, was filling top jobs with talented female executives.

“I tried to find the people who are smarter than me,” he said. “Most were women.”

Leonard Alan Lauder was born on Mar 19, 1933, in New York City, the first of two sons of Joseph Lauter and the former Josephine Esther Mentzer.

Estee Lauder the company grew out of the early entrepreneurship of Lauder’s mother, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Starting in the 1930s, she sold moisturisers and concealers that her uncle, a chemist, had taught her to make. For her business’s name, she came up with Estee – a fancy-looking version of Esty, one of her nicknames – and a softened version, Lauder, of her husband’s surname, Lauter.

“Vaguely European”

“She wanted something that sounded feminine and vaguely European, distinctive but elegant, and easy to pronounce and remember,” Lauder wrote in his 2020 memoir.

His parents divorced in 1939, remarried in 1942 and formed their company in 1946. A year later, it got its first major order, from Saks Fifth Avenue for US$800 worth of product, according to a company history.

Lauder earned a bachelor’s degree at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and served as a lieutenant in the US Navy before joining Estee Lauder in 1958.

He became a driving force behind the company’s international expansion, starting with the opening of a counter at Harrods department store in London in 1960.

Lauder credited his mother with distinguishing her brand from more deeply rooted competitors – including Elizabeth Arden, Revlon and Helena Rubinstein – by establishing it as a product sold only at the most upscale department stores, such as Saks in New York, Himelhoch’s in Detroit and Sakowitz in Houston.

Succeeded by son

“The fewer stores we sell, the more successful we are,” Lauder told The New York Times in 1982. “We roll things out very, very slowly.”

He was president of Estee Lauder from 1972 to 1995, chief executive officer from 1982 to 1999 and chairman from 1995 to 2009, when he became chairman emeritus and his son, William, became executive chairman. Lauder served on the board until 2023.

An art collector, he donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art his collection of Cubist art, worth more than US$1 billion. He was chairman emeritus of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which named its new home after him.

Lauder’s extensive philanthropy also included founding, with his brother, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, targeting a disease that had afflicted their famous mother.

Lauder had two sons, Gary and William, with his first wife, the former Evelyn Hausner, who died in 2011. She was a co-founder of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. In 2015, he married the former Judy Glickman, a photographer whose works are in museums around the world.

He is survived by his wife, sons, numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as his brother Ronald and his family, according to the company’s statement. BLOOMBERG