Frederick W. Smith, 1944-2025
America is losing some of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th century, and among the greatest was the FedEx founder Fred Smith, who died this weekend at age 80.
Frederick W. Smith was born in Mississippi in 1944 and served in the Marines in the fraught 1960s, including two tours in Vietnam. He attended Yale but liked to say that he learned more about the principles he used to found and run FedEx from the Marines than at the Ivy League school.
Smith founded FedEx in 1973 with a handful of aircraft. By 2022 it had 560,000 employees in 220 countries. The company revolutionized package and letter delivery. It promised overnight delivery of letters and goods, and its ubiquitous envelopes marked new competition for the Pony Express that was the U.S. Postal Service. FedEx was an exemplar of American 20th-century innovation that improved the lives and businesses of tens of millions.
Fred Smith was also a rare CEO who wasn't afraid to speak up on public-policy issues, especially as an advocate for free-market capitalism. His company benefited greatly from the government's deregulation of transportation in the 1970s.
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