Leonard A. Lauder, beauty industry icon and Alzheimer's advocate, dies at 92
Image: https://www.elcompanies.com/
Leonard A. Lauder, the founders of The Estée Lauder Companies, passed away on Sunday. Not just a businessman, Leonard was known for his love for art, philanthropy and his contribution to medical institutions, and breast cancer and Alzheimer's research.
The death was announced by the Estée Lauder Companies. He was 92.
'Throughout his life, my father worked tirelessly to build and transform the beauty industry, pioneering many of the innovations, trends, and best practices that are foundational to the industry today,' said William P. Lauder, son and Chair, Board of Directors, The Estée Lauder Companies. 'He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer's and breast cancer.
Above all, my father was a man who practiced kindness with everyone he met. His impact was enormous. He believed that employees were the heart and soul of our company, and they adored him and moments spent with him. His warmth and thoughtfulness made an imprint on our company, the industry, and, of course, our family. Together with my family, The Estée Lauder Companies, and the countless people he touched, we celebrate his extraordinary life.'
by Taboola
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
Sponsored Links
Promoted Links
Promoted Links
You May Like
Memperdagangkan CFD Emas dengan salah satu spread terendah?
IC Markets
Mendaftar
Undo
Born in 1933 in New York City, the oldest son of Estée and Joseph H. Lauder, Leonard was was a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and the Officer Candidate School of the United States Navy. He also studied at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. He served as President of The Estée Lauder Companies from 1972 to 1995 and as Chief Executive Officer from 1982 through 1999.
The man who dreamt of taking Estee Lauder to great heights
When Leonard A. Lauder joined Estée Lauder, the company was making just around $800,000 a year. But his dream, as he wrote in his 2020 memoir The Company I Keep, was much bigger—he wanted to turn Estée Lauder into the "General Motors of the beauty business." And he did just that. By 2021, the company's annual sales had skyrocketed to over $16 billion—even with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under his leadership, Estée Lauder grew into a global beauty powerhouse, with around 30 brands sold in 150 countries.
While the company went public in 1995, the Lauder family still kept a tight grip. As of January 2025, they owned about 85% of the voting stock and roughly 38% of the total common stock. Leonard remained a senior board member until the end, watching the company grow from a family-run brand into a global beauty empire.
His contribution to Alzheimer's research
Leonard Lauder wasn't just a beauty mogul—he was a force in philanthropy too. He co-founded and chaired the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) with his brother in honor of their mother, Estee Lauder's, battle with Alzheimer's.
He also helped launch the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering with his first wife, and served as an emeritus trustee at the University of Pennsylvania. Beyond business, he was one of America's most generous art lovers and donors, giving hundreds of millions to museums, hospitals, and research in Alzheimer's and breast cancer.
"Leonard Lauder was a once-in-a-generation visionary whose leadership, along with his brother Ronald, reshaped the Alzheimer's research landscape," said Dr. Howard Fillit, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of the ADDF. "From the very beginning, Leonard understood that Alzheimer's does not just impact the patient, it affects entire families. The Lauder family recognized the emotional, financial, and societal toll of this disease, and built the ADDF to accelerate the discovery and development of treatments that could change the trajectory for patients and their loved ones.
Leonard's vision, generosity, and humanity spanned across his business acumen to his philanthropic endeavors, touching countless lives, and his legacy will endure in every breakthrough we help bring forward."
One step to a healthier you—join Times Health+ Yoga and feel the change
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
11 minutes ago
- Time of India
What took Google hours to fix a glitch that its engineers 'identified in 10 minutes'
Google has apologised for a major outage recently that impacted services running on Google Cloud across the globe recently. The widespread outage disrupted over 70 Google Cloud services, bringing down major third-party platforms like Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Shopify, as well as Google's own products, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Meet. In an incident report released late Friday (June 17), the company said, "Google Cloud, Google Workspace and Google Security Operations products experienced increased 503 errors in external API requests, impacting customers." Google attributed the hours-long downtime to a series of flawed updates, particularly a new 'quota policy checks' feature introduced in May. The feature, designed to evaluate automated incoming requests, was not adequately tested in real-world scenarios. This led to blank entries being sent across all Google Cloud data centers, triggering widespread system crashes. What caused the Google Cloud outage "On May 29, 2025, a new feature was added to Service Control for additional quota policy checks. This code change and binary release went through our region by region rollout, but the code path that failed was never exercised during this rollout due to needing a policy change that would trigger the code. As a safety precaution, this code change came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path. The issue with this change was that it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash. Feature flags are used to gradually enable the feature region by region per project, starting with internal projects, to enable us to catch issues. If this had been flag protected, the issue would have been caught in staging," said Google in the Incident report. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Nejapa: Invierte $100 en AES CFD [Lee más] ofertas especiales Contáctanos Undo What took Google engineers hours to fix the issue and the way forward According to the company, Google engineers identified the issue within 10 minutes, but the outage persisted for seven hours due to overloaded systems in larger regions. Google admitted it failed to use feature flags, a standard industry practice that could have caught the issue during a gradual rollout. " Within 10 minutes, the root cause was identified and the red-button (to disable the serving path) was being put in place. The red-button was ready to roll out ~25 minutes from the start of the incident. Within 40 minutes of the incident, the red-button rollout was completed, and we started seeing recovery across regions, starting with the smaller ones first. Within some of our larger regions, such as us-central-1, as Service Control tasks restarted, it created a herd effect on the underlying infrastructure it depends on (i.e. that Spanner table), overloading the infrastructure. Service Control did not have the appropriate randomized exponential backoff implemented to avoid this. It took up to ~2h 40 mins to fully resolve in us-central-1 as we throttled task creation to minimize the impact on the underlying infrastructure and routed traffic to multi-regional databases to reduce the load. At that point, Service Control and API serving was fully recovered across all regions. Corresponding Google and Google Cloud products started recovering with some taking longer depending upon their architecture," said Google in its Incident Report. To prevent future incidents, Google said it will overhaul its system architecture to ensure operations continue even if one component fails. The company also committed to auditing its systems and improving both automated and human communication channels to keep customers informed during issues. Google apologises for the outage 'We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,' Google wrote in the incident report. 'Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers' businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.' CEO of Google's cloud unit Thomas Kurian, also posted about the outage in a Twitter post, saying 'we regret the disruption this caused our customers.' AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Time of India
12 minutes ago
- Time of India
To regularise illegal houses, Goa govt plans bill to bypass comunidade
Panaji: State govt is likely to introduce two different bills in the monsoon session of the Goa legislative assembly, scheduled to be held from July 22, to regularise illegal structures on comunidade land and govt land. The govt, through the bill, will empower the administrator of the comunidade to decide on the application — bypassing the comunidade — to regularise the illegal structures on the respective comunidade, not exceeding an area of 300sqm. Initially, govt wanted to issue an ordinance, but as the assembly was being summoned, state govt decided to introduce bills in the monsoon session. In 2012, BJP govt tried to consider regularising illegal houses that were built up to the year 2000 on comunidade properties in Goa, but it did not see the light of day as no comunidade gave any no-objection certificates (NOCs) to applicants. State govt has started discussions, and already three meetings have been held to finalise how illegal houses and encroachments can be legalised on govt and comunidade land. 'We held three meetings. Govt will bring two bills to legalise illegal houses and encroachments on govt and comunidade land. There will be a few more meetings to finalise the bills,' a senior govt official said. The bills are likely to give powers to the administrator of the comunidade to decide on applications to regularise structures on comunidade land. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Powerful Yet Gentle Steaming by Philips Philips Garment Steamers Shop Now Undo In terms of govt land, the bill is likely to give power to collectors to regularise. Collectors will decide on applications and collect the market price amount for the land from the applicant. Once the money is paid, govt will issue a sanad. 'On comunidade land, the deputy collector will issue an order, collect the amount, and issue the sanad. The comunidade will not have any role to play, but the money will be deposited in the respective comunidade once the land has been regularised,' a senior officer said, noting that this is still under discussion. While some ministers are pushing to finalise as soon as possible, there is opposition from other ministers in the cabinet as it will encourage illegalities in the state. 'The govt wants to have a cut-off date of 2025, which means all the illegalities will be legalised in the state,' the senior official said. In his budget speech, chief minister Pramod Sawant decided to regularise illegal structures up to 1,000sqm in urban areas and 600sqm in rural areas by amending the Goa Regularisation of Unauthorised Construction Act, 2016. In 2012, BJP govt tried to consider regularising illegal houses that were built up to the year 2000 on comunidade properties in Goa, but it did not see the light of day. Similarly, in 2001, BJP attempted to regularise the illegal houses. The govt even issued a notification in 2001, but the effort was in vain because govt did not take comunidades into confidence. In 2001, govt said that the comunidade had to give a NOC to legalise illegal structures on comunidade land, but not a single comunidade gave an NOC to encroachers.
Time of India
19 minutes ago
- Time of India
Export of natural diamonds may see turnaround as China reignites demand
Indian diamond exporters are hopeful of a rebound in Chinese demand after three years of decline as top jewellery retailers in China have rolled out a buyback programme to rekindle interest in natural diamonds. Retailers like Chow Tai Fook, Lao Feng Xiang, Chow Sang Sang, Luk Fook, Chow Tai Seng, and Qeelin introduced the buyback offer last month, leading to a spike in queries. "The buyback scheme has created positive sentiment among the Chinese diamond buyers and queries have gradually started coming in," said Sabyasachi Ray, executive director of Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC). Indian cut and polished diamond exports to China have halved in the last three years to $3.28 billion in 2024-25 from $6.55 billion in 2021-22 as consumers there moved away from diamond to gold as a safe haven. China is the second largest consumer of diamonds from India after the US. Indian trade executives expect renewed diamond sale in China from September as June to August are traditionally dull months. Live Events "Now that the buyback scheme has been introduced for diamonds like gold, we expect diamond demand from China will pick up from September onwards," said Colin Shah, managing director of Kama Jewellery, a leading diamond jewellery manufacturer and exporter. China has been facing economic challenges with poor consumer spending since the Covid-19 pandemic. "China's economy is facing significant headwinds, including a real estate slump, slow consumer spending, and the ongoing impact of trade tensions with the US," Shah said. "All these have impacted natural diamond consumption in the country." Increasing popularity of lab-grown diamonds - which are significantly cheaper than natural diamonds - among young Chinese consumers has also dented the demand for natural diamonds, trade insiders said.
