The Lonely Fall of Aristotle Onassis: The Billionaire Who Lost It All

He died with $500 million and no one who loved him at his bedside. Greek papers called it the loneliest funeral of the century, a billionaire buried on his own island by his own employees. The path there starts on a Smyrna rooftop in 1922, where a 16-year-old watched his family's world go to ash. He reached Buenos Aires with $250 sewn into his coat, worked the docks for $0.50 a day, and owned a tobacco fortune by 25. Then he bought six freighters for the price of a house while the world was going bankrupt, and rode a war and an oil boom into the largest private tanker fleet on earth. The fortune kept growing, and the family around it kept breaking. He married Tina Livanos at 17 in a merger, not a romance. He gave Maria Callas nine years, then married Jackie Kennedy instead, paying $3 million under a prenup that read like a contract. His son Alexander died at 24 when a plane with crossed controls crashed on takeoff. His daughter Christina inherited the empire and died at 37. The empire did not outlive him. Olympic Airways was re-nationalized and collapsed in 2009. Skorpios sold in 2013 for $153 million. The Christina was scrapped. What survived is the question he never let himself ask: what is the point of winning if there is no one left to share it with?