Sir Martin Stuart Sorrell (born 14 February 1945) is a British businessman and the founder of WPP plc, the world's largest advertising and PR group, both by revenue and the number of staff. Upon being ousted in April 2018, Sorrell was the longest-serving chief executive of a FTSE 100 company. He is consistently one of the UK's highest-paid corporate executives. According to The Sunday Times Rich List in 2019, Sorrell is worth £368 million. Sorrell has served on boards and advisory bodies of a number of high-profile public, academic and business organisations, including several leading business schools, both in the UK and internationally. Early life and education Martin Stuart Sorrell was born in London on 14 February 1945 to a Jewish family: his father was an electronics retailer, whose ancestors came from Ukraine, Poland and Romania. He was educated at the independent Haberdashers' Boys' School, then studied Economics at Christ's College, Cambridge, and gained an MBA from Harvard University in 1968. Career Early career Sorrell joined Glendinning Associates, then James Gulliver and then worked for the sports agent Mark McCormack. He joined Saatchi & Saatchi in 1975, and was group finance director from 1977 until 1984. Often referred to as "the third brother", he designed and carried out many of Saatchi's agency acquisitions. Sorrell undertook this by refining the practice of the ‘earn-out’. WPP In 1985, Sorrell privately invested in Wire and Plastic Products plc, a British wire shopping basket manufacturer, and joined it full-time as chief executive in 1986. He began to acquire "below-the-line" advertising-related companies, purchasing 18 in three years, including in 1987 when he stunned the agency world with a $566 million hostile takeover of J. Walter Thompson. Sorrell followed this in 1989 with another dramatic hostile $825 million buy of Ogilvy and Mather. Group chairman David Ogilvy publicly referred to Sorrell as an "odious little shit". Since 2000, WPP also acquired two more integrated, global agency networks, Young & Rubicam and Grey. In 2005 Sorrell sold £9m of shares in WPP at the end of a restricted stock holding period. He also agreed to change a contract with the company which had been much criticised by institutional shareholders in WPP as being unfairly written in Sorrell's favour. Under the previous agreement if Sorrell had been terminated, it would have led to a very large payout; the new agreement provided him instead with no termination payment. Shareholders