Leonard Alan Lauder (born March 19, 1933) is an American billionaire, philanthropist, art collector. He and his brother, Ronald Lauder, are the sole heirs to the Estée Lauder Companies cosmetics fortune, founded by their parents, Estée Lauder and Joseph Lauder, in 1946. Having been its CEO until 1999, Lauder is the chairman emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. During his tenure as the CEO, the company went public at The New York Stock Exchange in 1996 and acquired several major cosmetics brands, including MAC Cosmetics, Aveda, Bobbi Brown, and La Mer. In 2013, Lauder promised his collection of Cubist art to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collection is valued at over $1 billion and constitutes one of the largest gifts in the museum's history. Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Lauder's net worth at US$32.3 billion as of September 2021, the 44th richest person in the world. Biography Leonard Lauder is the elder son of Joseph and Estée Lauder and the elder brother of Ronald Lauder. His family is Jewish. He married Evelyn Hausner in July 1959. They had two sons: William, executive chairman of the Estée Lauder Companies, and Gary, managing director of Lauder Partners LLC. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and he also studied at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business before serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. He formally joined Estée Lauder in 1958 when he was 25. He created the company's first research and development laboratory in the mid-1990s and was responsible for the company acquiring brands like MAC, Bobbi Brown and Aveda. Under his leadership in the late 1980s, Estée Lauder opened its first store in Moscow with support from the Gosbank daughter the Moscow Narodny Bank Limited in London. Lauder stepped down as CEO of Estée Lauder in 1999, but remains Chairman Emeritus of the company and is known around the company as "Chief Teaching Officer". Lauder gained notoriety in 2001 for creating the Lipstick index, a since discredited economic indicator, meant to reflect a proclivity to spend money on luxury items even in the face of crisis. For many years, he has resided on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. On January 1, 2015, Lauder married photographer Judy Ellis Glickman. Leonard Lauder, unlike his brother, supported Kathy Hochul's first campaign for New York governor in 2022. Art collection Lauder is a major art