After graduating from highschool, John Catsimatidis desired to spend the summer of 1966 as any teenager would – watching TV and lounging on his parents’ couch in Upper Manhattan.
But fate had other plans for the Greek immigrant who arrived within the States as an infant in 1949.
Catsimatidis’s mom, Despina, couldn’t stand by and watch her son, an impressive student at Brooklyn Tech HS with a median IQ of around 140, be a couch potato.
So she dragged John to a close-by food market and had him work arranging shelves and doing anything under the sun to earn a good paycheck.
His mother’s insistence that he discover a job that summer was integral to Catsimatidis becoming a self-proclaimed billionaire business tycoon, he writes in his recent memoir, How Far Do You Need to Go?: Lessons from a Common-Sense Billionaire (Matt Holt ), on Tuesday.
“Life can be completely different if my mum never pushed me off the couch,” Catsimatidis told The Post.
After that summer, Catsimatidis founded Latest York University and enrolled within the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, where he majored in engineering, but wasn’t sure what he really desired to do along with his life. With six credits in need of graduation, he did the unthinkable and dropped out of a prestigious school to work with “Cousin Tony”, the person round the corner who once hired him to work at a food market. Tony, a Greek immigrant who may or may not have been related by blood, desired to sell his share of the shop he owned along with his uncle Nick.
He offered his half of Catsimatidis for nothing upfront, but as an alternative $1,000 monthly down payments. Catsimatidis agreed to the deal, horrifying his parents.
“We sent you to the university to remain humanitarian?” said his dad, the chef and waiter, using the slang term for the crate carrier.
His mother, meanwhile, believed that he “wasted not only my education, but in addition your complete family trip to America, which modified my whole life,” writes Catsimatidis. “I attempted to inform her that the reality is precisely the alternative. Why work for another person once I can run my very own business? Wasn’t that the essence of the American Dream?”
In 1969, just nine months into their enterprise, Catsimatidis and Nick were making $1,000 per week — electrical engineers were making just $129 per week on the time — and things looked good. Then the “tough guy round the corner” tried to coerce the shop worker. Nick told him to back off, however the bandit got here back.
So Catsimatidis brought the gun to work and pulled it out when the con man returned.
“I didn’t hesitate for a second. I went straight to the person. I took a pistol from my jacket pocket and pressed the steel barrel against the person’s head. “You are approaching that three-block store again,” I said calmly but directly, “I’ll blow your head off.” He didn’t say a word.”
By 1974, Catsimatidis and Nick’s food business—then called Red Apple—had expanded to several locations throughout Latest York City. Catsimatidis was only 24 years old.
“I used to be making 1,000,000 dollars a 12 months, but I used to be still living at home with my family,” he said. “That is how I desired to do it.”
As his profits increased, so did his longing for his youthful passion.
Shortly before his thirtieth birthday, he earned his pilot’s license and purchased a jet from Walt Disney’s brother Roy.
“Once I was younger, I desired to attend an Air Force academy, which led me to this,” said Catsimatidis. “I actually loved flying, especially on Tuesday afternoons.”
He eventually branched out into air travel, flying people to Atlantic City in a fleet of 20 planes within the early Eighties.
In 1986, he sold the aviation business to an associate of Warren Buffett, who later used it to launch NetJets.
In the identical 12 months, Red Apple acquired Gristedes, making it the most important supermarket chain in Latest York City.
Because the a long time passed, Catsimatidis dabbled in politics. In 2013, he ran for mayor of Latest York City within the Republican primary, but was ultimately defeated by former deputy mayor Joe Lhota, who lost to Bill de Blasio.
Currently, Catsimatidis oversees Gristedes Foods, a food empire with over 30 stores in Latest York City. It also manages roughly 2 million square feet of real estate throughout Latest York, Florida and elsewhere in the USA, and manages the United Refining Company, an oil refinery in Pennsylvania.
In 2020, he acquired WABC, where he shows off his chat gift every weekday at 5 p.m. on the “Cats and Cosby” radio show with Rita Cosby. Forbes estimates his net price to be $4 billion – not bad for a school dropout.
“You possibly can’t win in case you’re too afraid of losing,” he writes, adding, “Great success takes great effort—overwork everyone.”