Martin is a Wall Street genius who went from walking horses after races to owning and breeding championship thoroughbreds after making millions of dollars investing in online companies that sell medicine by mail and organize medical documents. J. Wigod passed away on April 12th in San Diego. He was 84 years old.
His daughter Emily Bushnell said he died at the hospital due to complications from lung disease.
Mr. Wigod, who grew up near two racetracks in suburban New York and was mentored by software pioneers, investors and gamblers, was the youngest managing partner of a New York Stock Exchange brokerage firm in the 1960s. It is. He became a billionaire before he was 30, and in less than 10 years he built Medco Containment Services into the nation's largest mail-order prescription drug and benefits management company, selling it to Merck for $6 billion in 1993. did. The sale netted Mr. Wygod a profit of $250 million.
Jean Bach, chairman of the pharmaceutical industry consulting firm Princeton Group International, commented on the 1994 sale to the New York Times that “the name of the game in the future will be information.” Because he developed the database himself. ”
Wygod later became chairman of WebMD, a leader in online health information services, before selling the company in 2017 for a reported $2.8 billion.
He married Pamela Yellin in 1980, and in 1995 the couple moved from New Jersey to the 110-acre River Edge Farm in Buellton, California, where they raised mares and stallions into top racehorses.
Ranked as California's leading Thoroughbred breeders in 2006, 2007 and 2008, the couple bred 124 stakes-winning horses, with or without a partner, according to Blood Horse magazine. They moved their breeding operations to Kentucky in 2010.
Martin Joshua Wigod was born in Manhattan on February 1, 1940, to Max and Rose (Greenwald) Wigod, accountants and haberdashers who immigrated from Poland.
His love of horses began when he was a student at Lawrence High School in suburban Nassau County, where he befriended Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel. In his teenage years, he would play with classmates at his parks in the Aqueduct and Belmont, and walk his horses to cool down after training and races.
After graduating in 1961 from New York University, where her daughter studied Hinduism and Buddhism, Mr. Wigod began his career on Wall Street with a $20,000 initiation gift from his mother (equivalent to just over $200,000 today). I was allowed to.
He told the Times in 2000 that his mentor was Fletcher Jones, a pioneer in the commercialization of computer software who led Mr. Wygod into the technology business. Fred Kerr, investment manager. and Manny Kalish, the gambler who ran the race in a New York tabloid and coached Mr. Wigod in picking the winner.
Mr. Wygod helped Mr. Jones, founder of Computer Science Corporation, take his company public. With this offering, Mr. Wygod's seed money of his $20,000 grew to about $50 million by his 1980s.
In 1965, Mr. Jones gave Mr. Wigod two horses for his 25th birthday.
“They both won their first fights,” Wigod said in 2000. “I was hooked.”
His stable won more than a dozen major races over the years.
At age 23, Mr. Wigod started his own brokerage firm. He sold it three years later for $10 million. The following year, he and two other investors, Bernie Marden and Albert Weiss, purchased a controlling interest in Glassrock Medical Services, which manufactures equipment for the health care industry. By 1982, he had sold most of his interests in Glassrock and another company, dividing his original $2 million investment into $125 million.
Mr. Carr was an early supporter of Medco. Michael Milken, another long-time investor in Mr. Wygod's business, told the Times in 2000 that Medco was inspired by a prescription drug for autoworkers from then-Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca. He recalls that the complaint was that the company was incurring a small amount of costs.Medco negotiated discounts and incentives for employees who purchased lower-priced generic drugs..
“This was really one of the great creations of a business from scratch,” Milken said. He added: “I'll invest in anything Marty does, except for the horses.”
In fact, horses were no exception. The horse racing business operated by Wygods has recorded lifetime earnings of over $21 million, including his best year of 2009, when he earned $2.8 million.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Wygod is survived by his son, Max; their daughter Ellen; stepson Adam Yellin; his sister Marian; and three grandchildren.
His daughter is an equestrian, and Wygod, along with pedigree consultant Rick Waldman, presented her with his 3-year-old stallion Resilience. This child will raise Mr. Wygod's achievements even further. By winning the Wood Memorial in New York on April 6, Resilience qualified for the 150th Kentucky Derby on May 4.