Mitchell Rales - Biography

Mitchell Rales (born c. 1956) is an American businessman. He has been a director of Danaher Corporation since 1983.

Biography

Early life and education

Mitchell Rales grew up in Bethesda, Maryland and graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1974. He earned a degree in business administration at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1978 and was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

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Career

In 1979, he 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. They changed the name to Diversified Mortgage Investors, in 1978, and then Danaher, in 1984.

In the 1980s, the AM side of 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, (including Converse (shoe company), and Ethan Allen (furniture company)). He later ended the bid after five months with a profit of $60 million.

In May 2008, they engineered the initial public offering of Colfax, a Richmond, Virginia industrial pumps manufacturer.

Philanthropy

He is on the boards of both the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

Glenstone Museum

The museum houses his collection of modern and contemporary masterworks. Located on of landscaped lawns, meadows and woods in Potomac, Maryland, this private art museum was designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects. The structure, which is part of an assemblage of buildings and outdoor sculpture, stands across a pond from the client’s home, guesthouse and pool house. The museum is a multiple volume, single-level structure clad in zinc panels and French limestone. A large, naturally lit sculpture gallery is the organizing element for a sequence of 18-feet-high gallery spaces with state-of-the-art museum environmental controls, and an administrative office suite. The sculpture gallery is also the gathering space for receptions and special events and opens onto a terrace overlooking the pond and grounds. Support space to one side of the galleries includes high-density art storage, temporary holding space, a service dock and a catering kitchen.

Visitors to the museum grounds must first pass through the estate’s entry gatehouse, and then drive along a maple tree-lined road, passing between two commissioned sculptures by Richard Serra and Tony Smith. The cobblestone entry court, anchored by another Richard Serra piece, has views of the pond, the residence and a commissioned Ellsworth Kelly totem sculpture which acts as the site’s fulcrum.

Access is by appointment only.

External links

• #323 Mitchell Rales profile in Forbes The World's Billionaires, 2007