William E. Simon

William Edward Simon was an American businessman and philanthropist who served as the 63rd United States Secretary of the Treasury. He became the Secretary of the Treasury on May 9, 1974, during the Nixon administration. After Nixon resigned, Simon was reappointed by President Gerald Ford and served until 1977 when President Jimmy Carter took office. Outside of government, he was a successful businessman and philanthropist. The William E. Simon Foundation carries on this legacy. 

Simon was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on November 27, 1927, the son of Eleanor (née Kearns) and Charles Simon, Jr., an insurance executive. He attended Blair Academy and graduated from Newark Academy, where he focused more on sports than scholastic pursuits. After service in the infantry of the US Army, he received his B.A. in 1952 from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. There, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Rho Chapter). In his later life, Simon was a member of the board of trustees from 1972 to 1973.

He began his career with Union Securities in 1952. He served as vice president of Weeden & Co. before he became the senior partner in charge of the Government and Municipal Bond Departments at Salomon Brothers, where he was a member of the firm's seven-man Executive Committee.

A meeting of Nixon Administration economic advisors and cabinet members on May 7, 1974. Clockwise from Richard Nixon: George Shultz, James T. Lynn, Alexander Haig, Roy Ash, Herbert Stein, and William E. Simon.

At the time of his nomination as Treasury Secretary, Simon was serving as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, a post he had held from January 22, 1973. As Deputy Secretary, he supervised the Nixon administration's program to restructure and improve U.S. financial institutions. He also served as the first Administrator of the Federal Energy Office. From December 4, 1973, Simon simultaneously launched and administered the Federal Energy Administration at the height of the oil embargo. As such he became known as the high-profile "Energy Czar", and represented a revitalization of the "czar" term in U.S. politics. He also chaired the President's Oil Policy Committee and was instrumental in revising the mandatory oil import program in April 1973. Simon was a member of the President's Energy Resources Council and continued to have major responsibility for coordinating both domestic and international energy policy.

In August 1974, only three months after Simon became Secretary of the Treasury, President Nixon resigned. Simon was asked to continue to serve at Treasury by President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., who shortly afterward appointed him chairman of the Economic Policy Board and chief spokesman for the administration on economic issues. On April 8, 1975, President Ford also named him chairman of the newly created East-West Foreign Trade Board, established under the authority of the Trade Act of 1974.

In 1977, Simon received the Alexander Hamilton Award, the Treasury Department's highest honor. In 1976, while serving as Secretary of the Treasury, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt presented Simon with the Collar of the Republic/Order of the Nile. Simon's term as Secretary of the Treasury ended on January 20, 1977.

As Treasury Secretary, Simon claimed to support free markets and to spurn government policies that either subsidized or penalized businesses. 

Simon attempted to purchase controlling interest in the Baltimore Orioles from Jerold Hoffberger for $12 million, but it aroused fears that he was going to move the franchise to Washington, D.C. Negotiations which began in the summer of 1978 ended when he withdrew his offer on February 5, 1979. He bitterly complained, "Mr. Hoffberger wants to play both ends against the middle. Well, he can forget this end. I think at this point and at this time the game is over. He has damaged the merchandise and acted in bad faith. I think I've been played dirty pool everywhere to Sunday." The Orioles were acquired at the same price six months later on August 2 by Edward Bennett Williams who had represented Simon in those negotiations.

Simon was a pioneer of the leveraged buyout (LBO) in the 1980s. Following government service, Simon was a Vice Chairman at Blyth Eastman Dillon for three years, He and his partner, then co-founded with Ray Chambers, a tax accountant, Wesray Capital Corporation (Simon contributing the "Wes" and Chambers contributing the "ray" based on his initials), an LBO firm that bought and sold, among others, the Gibson Greeting Card Company, Anchor Glass, and the Simmons Mattress Company, typically investing tiny fractions of their own money and including significant debt to complete the purchase from prior shareholders, and then selling the companies whole or piecemeal after making changes that "often included job cutbacks and other short-term cost-reduction measures." In 1982, Wesray invested approximately $1 million in equity capital (with Simon contributing $330,000) and borrowed another $79 million to take private a Cincinnati-based greeting card company, Gibson Greetings, for $80 million. Eighteen months later, the company was taken public again, with a value of $290 million, and Simon's $330,000 investment was worth $66 million.

In 1984, he launched WSGP International, which concentrated on investments in real estate and financial service organizations in the western United States and on the Pacific Rim. In 1988, together with sons William E. Simon Jr. and J. Peter Simon, he founded William E. Simon & Sons, a global merchant bank with offices in New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. In 1990, he partnered with several investors to form Catterton-Simon Partners, a private equity firm focused on beverages and other consumer products, which today is known as Catterton Partners.

In the Anchor Glass case, Simon made millions more through deals with the company wherein the company leased its land, buildings, and equipment from Simon. Wesray also received banking fees for handling the subsequent purchase by Anchor of Midland Glass Company. Anchor Glass also bought casualty, liability, employee health and benefit insurance from a brokerage firm partially owned by Simon. The Anchor Glass corporate headquarters in Tampa was leased from Simon. Anchor Glass later admitted in an SEC filing, that "these arrangements ... were not the result of arm's length bargaining ... [and] were not ... favorable to the company". Anchor Glass was finally bought by a Mexican company, Vitro, S.A. 

Simmons Mattress Company, a company founded in 1886, was bought by Wesray and partners bought in 1986 for $120 million and sold it in 1989 for $241 million.

By the late 1980s, Forbes magazine was estimating Simon's wealth at $300 million. During his business career, Simon served on the boards of over thirty companies including Xerox, Citibank, Halliburton, Dart & Kraft, and United Technologies. In 2017, William E. Simon & Sons merged with Massy Quick & Company in an all-equity transaction.

Simon was a resident of Harding Township, New Jersey. The superyacht Itasca was owned by Simon, the first such yacht to pass through the Northwest Passage, followed by a visit to Antarctica.

He was married first to Carol Girard in 1950. William and Carol Simon had two sons and five daughters (Bill, J. Peter, Mary Beth, Carol Leigh, Aimee, Julie Ann and Johanna) and 27 grandchildren. She died in 1995. Simon married his second wife, Tonia Adams Donnelley in 1996.

Simon died of complications of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 72, on June 3, 2000 in Santa Barbara, California.