Howard Schultz (born July 19, 1953) is an American business magnate. He is the best known as the chairman and CEO[2] of Starbucks and a former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics. Schultz co-founded Maveron, an investment group, in 1998 with Dan Levitan.
In 2006, Forbes magazine ranked Schultz as the 354th richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $1.1 billion
Biography
Howard Schultz was born to a German-Jewish family on July 19, 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of ex-US Army trooper and then truck driver Fred Schultz, and his wife Elaine.[4] With his younger sister, Ronnie, and brother, Michael, he grew up in the Canarsie Bayview Houses of the New York City Housing Authority. As Schultz's family was poor, he saw an escape in sports such as baseball, football, and basketball. He went to Canarsie High School, from which he graduated in 1971. In high school, Schultz excelled at sports and was awarded an athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan University[4] – the first person in his family to go to college. A member of Tau Kappa Epsilon, Schultz received his bachelor's degree in Communications in 1975. He has two children, named Eliahu Jordan, who goes by Jordan, and Addison.
[edit] Career …show more content…
In 1979 he became a general manager for Swedish drip coffee maker manufacturer, Hammarplast. In 1981, Schultz visited a client of Hammarplast, a fledgling coffee-bean shop called Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle which he joined as the Director of Marketing a year later.[5] On a buying trip to Milan, Italy for Starbucks, Schultz noted that coffee bars existed on practically every street. He learned that they not only served excellent espresso, they also served as meeting places or public squares; they were a big part of Italy's societal glue, and there were 200,000 of them in the country.[citation