Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Lady de Rothschild is an American-British businesswoman who is the chief executive officer of E.L. Rothschild, a holding company she owns with her third husband, Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild family. The company manages investments in The Economist Group, owner of The Economist magazine, Congressional Quarterly and the Economist Intelligence Unit, E.L. Rothschild LP, a leading independent wealth management firm in the United States, as well as real estate, agricultural and food interests. She publicly supports many politicians including Hillary Clinton. She rallies for a political movement called Inclusive Capitalism, and led the Conference of Inclusive Capitalism in London in 2014 and 2015, and founded the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism.
After leaving law school, she was an associate at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm for four years, before working for telecommunications billionaire John Kluge in the 1980s, helping him acquire small companies that held local cellular licenses. Rothschild then invested in telecoms businesses in North America and Europe, in partnership with Motorola, claiming in 2012 that by the late 1990s she had amassed a nine-figure fortune. Rothschild became Executive Vice President for Development at Metromedia Inc from 1984–1989. From 1989–1995, Rothschild was the majority shareholder, Chairman and CEO, of TPI Communications International, Inc., one of the largest providers of paging, wireless data and cellular telephone service in Latin America, owned with Motorola. Under her management, TPI tripled its size and per-customer revenues, and cash flow grew to three times the U.S. average. In addition, she expanded operations from Puerto Rico into Latin America. She sold her stake in TPI to Motorola in 1995 for a figure reportedly between $80 million and $100 million. In 1995, Rothschild founded FirstMark Communications Inc in the United States, a broadband wireless company. In 1997, she sold her US interests in order to focus on international opportunities. In 1998, she founded FirstMark Communications of Europe, with the mission of building a pan-European broadband Internet company. Having secured licenses in Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Finland, she built a 20,000 km fiber network in 15 countries. The company was sold in June 2000 in a $1 billion financing, the largest private equity placement in the history of the European competitive telecommunications sector. Rothschild currently serves on the Board of Directors of Estée Lauder Companies, The Economist Group, Bronfman E.L. Rothschild LP and Christies International. She has also served on the Boards of Directors of Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation and General Instruments, Inc.
Politics
From 1993–1995, Rothschild served on President Bill Clinton's National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. From 1998–2000, she served on the US Secretary of Energy's Advisory Committee. Rothschild has donated to all of Bill and Hillary Clinton's federal races since 1992. Although Rothschild was a major fund raiser for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, she transferred her support to Republican candidate John McCain when Barack Obama beat Clinton, becoming a minor celebrity on cable television at the time for attacking Obama in a series of interviews. On June 22, 2011, she hosted a fundraiser for Jon Huntsman Jr.'s presidential campaign, an event originally planned to support Mitt Romney before she had a change of heart in the early summer of 2011. In the summer of 2016, she hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Rothschild co-chaired/founded the day-long Conference of Inclusive Capitalism in London on May 27, 2014, with the aim of adjusting the working of the capitalist system to work for more people and included an opening address by Prince Charles and guest speaker Bill Clinton. The second conference also took place in London on June 26, 2015 Rothschild is actively involved in policy and social issues, including micro-finance and women's rights. In 2006, she was appointed as a member of the UN Advisors Group on Inclusive Financial Services. She serves as Chairman of the Board for the American Patrons of the Tate Gallery, FAI, and the International Advisory Board of Columbia University School of Law. In addition, she serves as a Trustee of the ERANDA Foundation, the Outward Bound Trust, the Alfred Herrhausen Society of International Dialogue of Deutsche Bank and the Global Commercial Microfinance Consortium Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. She also sits on the board of the McCain Institute. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the Institute for Strategic Studies, the International Advisory Council of Asia House, and the Foreign Policy Association.
Personal life
Rothschild has been married three times. Her first marriage was to Alexander Hartley Platt of New Jersey, and took place at Brick Presbyterian Church on May 20, 1978. Her second husband was Andrew Stein, a New York politician and son of multi-millionaire businessman Jerry Finkelstein. Stein is nine years older than Forester and was Manhattan Borough President at the time of their marriage on March 12, 1983 and together, had two children before their divorce a decade later in 1993.
John Forester Stein, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania
Her third husband is Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, whom she was introduced to by Henry Kissinger at the 1998 Bilderberg Group conference in Scotland. They married on November 30, 2000, in London, England, after de Rothschild divorced his wife in 2000. She is his third wife. On the announcement of the marriage, the Rothschild couple were invited to spend their honeymoon at the White House by the Clintons. The couple divide their time between homes in New York and London, the summer home on Martha’s Vineyard and the Rothschild family's historic Ascott country estate in England. By virtue of her marriage to a knight, she is known socially as Lady de Rothschild.
