Reinhard Mohn, 1996
Reinhard Mohn, founder of Bertelsmann AG, celebrates his 80th birthday on June 29, 2001. The entrepreneur from Gütersloh (North Rhine-Westphalia) turned the family business with 300 employees into the world's third-largest media group, for which some 58,000 people work today. After returning from American captivity in 1947, Mohn inherited his father's legacy and took over the management of the destroyed publishing house. In 1950 he founded Bertelsmann Lesering, and in 1958 the record company Ariola. In 1968, eleven individual publishers became the Bertelsmann publishing group; a year later, it took over 25 percent of the Hamburg-based magazine group Gruner Jahr, and in 1976, its stake grew to 74.9 percent. Since the 1980s, Bertelsmann has been increasingly involved in private television. The continuity of the group is to be guaranteed by the charitable Bertelsmann Stiftung, founded in 1977, to which Mohn transferred his share assets in the same year and of which he is still an active board member today. In the spring of 2001, Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO, was able to convince Mohn to prepare the IPO, thus breaking one of his long-held principles. [automated translation]
