Mitchell Rales


Mitchell Rales is an American billionaire businessman, and a collector of modern and contemporary art. He co-founded Danaher Corporation in 1983 and is the chairman of its executive committee. Rales is one of the Washington, D.C. region's eleven billionaires. In collaboration with his wife Emily Wei Rales, an art historian and curator, he has established Glenstone, a private museum in Potomac, Maryland, which presents exhibitions of their collection of art.

Early life and education

Rales was born in 1956 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Raised in a Jewish family, Rales is one of four sons of Ruth and Norman Rales. Norman Rales was raised in an orphanage, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City, and later became a successful businessman, who sold his building supply company in Washington, D.C. to his employees in what was the first employee stock ownership plan transaction in the U.S. Norman Rales was also a philanthropist, having founded the Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation and the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service. Rales has three brothers: Joshua, Steven, and Stewart.
Rales grew up in Bethesda, Maryland and graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1974. As captain of both the high school football and baseball teams, Rales was an outstanding high school athlete. He earned a degree in business administration at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1978 and was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

Career

In 1979, Rales left his father's real estate firm to found Equity Group Holdings, with his brother, Steven M. Rales. Using junk bonds, they bought a diversified line of businesses. In 1978, they changed the name to Diversified Mortgage Investors, and then to Danaher, in 1984.
In the 1980s, the AM side of radio station WGMS was sold off to Washington, D.C., venture capitalists Steven and Mitchell Rales, who converted the music station into the first frequency for WTEM, a sports-talk station, in 1992. In 1988, he made a hostile takeover bid for Interco, Inc, which was, at the time, the nation's largest manufacturer of furniture and men's shoes. He later ended the bid after five months with a profit of $60 million.
In 1995, Rales and his brother founded Colfax, a Richmond, Virginia industrial pumps manufacturer, which had an initial public offering in May 2008.

Philanthropy

Rales has expressed a strong desire to spend his money philanthropically, saying to the Washington Post in 2018, "When we go, there's not going to be money bestowed on children and grandchildren in any meaningful way. This is about reallocating the money we had the good fortune of making to other causes." Rales is the president of the National Gallery of Art and is a former board member of the Hirshhorn Museum.

Glenstone

Rales and his wife, Emily Wei Rales, developed and financed Glenstone, a contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland. The museum first opened in 2006 and displays the Rales's collection of post-World War II art, including paintings, sculptures, and both indoor and outdoor installations. A major $219 million expansion to Glenstone was opened in 2018 that increased both the gallery space and the wooded land surrounding the galleries. The museum is free and open to the public via online booking.

Personal life

Rales has been married twice:
He lives in Potomac, Maryland.