Hail and farewell: Billionaires who breathed their last

 
Mike Ilitch, 87
US, $6 bln | Food & Beverage
Founder in 1959 (with his wife, Marian) of Little Caesars pizza. Detroit native and longtime resident who poured money into revitalising his beleaguered hometown. Owner of baseball’s Detroit Tigers and hockey’s Red Wings; development of his com­pany’s $1.2 billion District Detroit mixed-use project in the city’s midtown continues.

Cheng Yu-Tung, 91
Hong Kong, $14.5 bln | Real Estate
Diversified businessman whose conglom­erate’s most prominent holdings were jeweller Chow Tai Fook and real estate company New World Development, both now run by his son, Henry. A member of Forbes’s inaugural billionaires list in 1987, Cheng was an elementary school dropout whose wife’s father owned jewellery stores; in the 1960s and ’70s Cheng built them into Hong Kong’s biggest jewellery chain.


Jean-Claude Decaux, 78
France, $6.5 bln | Media & Entertainment
A pioneer of outdoor advertising—ads in Paris’s public toilets were a signature innovation of his—and founder in 1964 of JCDecaux, which at the time of his death was the world’s biggest outdoor-ad firm. In 2014, the company set a Guinness World Record for largest outdoor-advertising billboard with an immense 32,000-square-foot sign at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.


Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 64
UK, $13 bln | Real Estate
England’s Duke of Westminster and a friend of the royal family (his son, Hugh, is reportedly Prince George’s godfather). His company, Grosvenor Estate, oversees property in more than 60 cities worldwide; it has vast, valuable holdings in London and throughout the United Kingdom.

Forrest Mars Jr, 84
US, $23.4 bln | Food & Beverage
Heir to the eponymous candy company founded by his grandfather in 1911. Mars joined the business in 1959 after a stint at what was then Price Waterhouse; he became ­co-president with his brother John in 1975 and built it into a global conglomerate with 80,000 employees and $35 billion in annual revenue.


Jack Taylor, 94
US, $5.3 bln | Services
Founder in 1957 of Enterprise Holdings in St Louis, the rental car company he named after the aircraft carrier on which he served in World War II. The business, now overseen by Taylor’s son, operates the largest rental fleet in the world, with some 1.9 million cars and trucks under the Enterprise, Alamo and National brands.