LAS VEGAS — Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, an eighth-grade dropout who built Las Vegas’ biggest hotels, tried to take over the former Chrysler Corp., and bought and sold MGM at a profit three times, has died. He was 98.
He died Monday night in Beverly Hills.
The reserved, unpretentious Mr. Kerkorian spent much of his life trying to stay out of the spotlight and rarely gave interviews. He called himself a “small-town boy who got lucky.”
He shunned glitzy Hollywood parties and movie premieres in favor of making deals. Rather than arrive at an event by limousine, he often drove himself in a Mercury station wagon.
“He was a very private guy who shunned the limelight, both in a business way and from a charitable standpoint,” said Patty Glaser, his attorney of four decades.
After making his first fortune ferrying gamblers to Las Vegas with Trans International Airlines, he built the 30-story, 1,568-room International Hotel, the world’s largest when it opened in the late 1960s. He brought Elvis Presley to perform there in 1969 as the rock legend relaunched his live-performance career.
When Mr. Kerkorian opened the first MGM Grand in Las Vegas in the 1970s, it was again the world’s largest hotel, containing more than 2,000 rooms and a 1,200-seat showroom. Years later, he would build another MGM Grand, this one with more than 5,000 rooms — again, the world’s largest.
Elsewhere, Mr. Kerkorian bought and sold the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio three times, each time realizing a profit on his investment. He also invested heavily in the auto industry and made unsuccessful attempts to take over Chrysler.
“Regardless of what people think, there was no great master plan,” Mr. Kerkorian once said. “Every year was a big year for me. First I was simply trying to earn enough to get something to eat, then enough to buy a car.”
He was born Kerkor Kerkorian in Fresno, Calif., in 1917, one of four children of a poor Armenian fruit grower.
During his brief boxing career, he became Pacific amateur welterweight champion. But he lacked the size to turn pro, so he went into business. During World War II, he worked for the RAF Air Transport Command in Canada.
After the war, he refurbished a small twin-engine plane and flew passengers between Southern California and the growing desert gambling mecca of Las Vegas. In 1947, Mr. Kerkorian bought a tiny charter line and renamed it Trans International Airlines. Nearly two decades later, he took TIA public, and the stock soared. With cash from his stock and shrewd land deals along the Strip, he built the International Hotel.
By the 1970s, Mr. Kerkorian had working control of MGM and began a more than 30-year run of deals involving the historic studio. In 2004, he agreed to sell the studio and its lucrative library of post-1986 films to Sony Corp., Comcast, and other investors for about $3 billion. In 1985, he sold the first MGM Grand to Bally Corp. for $594 million, while retaining rights to the name.
Around that time, he also unloaded the MGM studio to cable TV mogul Ted Turner for a reported $1.5 billion, then bought it back three months later for $300 million, then sold for $1.3 billion, and finally bought it back in 1996 for the same amount.
In Las Vegas, he opened the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino and orchestrated the $6.4 billion merger between MGM Grand and Steve Wynn’s Mirage Resorts Inc., and later the renamed MGM Mirage Inc. completed its $4.8 billion acquisition of Mandalay Resort Group. The combined company’s holdings included the Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay Resort, Excalibur, and seven nearby hotels.
Mr. Kerkorian set his sights on the auto industry in 1995, trying to seize control of Chrysler Corp. in a failed $23 billion hostile bid. He made another bid for Chrysler in 2007, offering $4.5 billion, but it was rejected.
He married three times. He and his second wife had two daughters, Tracy and Linda.
First Published June 17, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
