Martin J. Wygod, a Wall Street whiz who graduated from strolling horses after races to proudly owning and breeding championship thoroughbreds when he made hundreds of thousands from investing in on-line firms that bought prescribed drugs by mail and pruned medical paperwork, died on April 12 in San Diego. He was 84.
His daughter, Emily Bushnell, stated he died in a hospital from issues of lung illness.
Raised close to two racetracks in suburban New York and mentored by a software program pioneer, an investor and a gambler, Mr. Wygod was stated to have been the youngest managing accomplice of a New York Stock Exchange brokerage within the Sixties. He grew to become a millionaire earlier than he was 30, and in 1993 he bought Medco Containment Services to Merck for $6 billion after constructing it into the nation’s largest mail-order prescription drug firm and profit supervisor in lower than a decade. The sale netted Mr. Wygod $250 million.
“The name of the game in the future is going to be information,” Jan Buck, chairman of Princeton Group International, a pharmaceutical business consulting agency, commented on the sale to The New York Times in 1994. “Marty Wygod made $6 billion for himself because he developed a data base.”
Mr. Wygod then grew to become the chairman of WebMD, a frontrunner in on-line well being data providers, which he bought in 2017 for a reported $2.8 billion.
He married Pamela Yellin in 1980, and in 1995 they moved from New Jersey to River Edge Farm, a 110-acre unfold in Buellton, Calif., the place they raised fillies and colts to change into prime racehorses.
Ranked as California’s main thoroughbred breeders in 2006, 2007 and 2008, the couple, each with and with out companions, bred 124 stakes winners, based on BloodHorse journal. They moved their breeding enterprise to Kentucky in 2010.
Martin Joshua Wygod was born on Feb. 1, 1940, in Manhattan to Max Wygod, an accountant and haberdasher who had immigrated from Poland, and Rose (Greenwald) Wygod.
His affection for horses started when he was a scholar at Lawrence High School in suburban Nassau County, the place he befriended Bobby Frankel, who would change into a Hall of Fame coach. As a young person, he frolicked with classmates at Aqueduct and Belmont Park, the place he walked horses to chill them down after exercises and races.
After graduating in 1961 from New York University, the place his daughter stated he studied Hinduism and Buddhism, Mr. Wygod started his Wall Street profession with a $20,000 starter reward from his mom (the equal of just a little greater than $200,000 right this moment).
He instructed The Times in 2000 that his mentors had been Fletcher Jones, who pioneered the commercialization of laptop software program and initiated Mr. Wygod into the expertise enterprise; Fred Carr, an funding supervisor; and Manny Kalish, a gambler who handicapped races for New York’s tabloid newspapers and tutored Mr. Wygod on selecting winners.
Mr. Wygod assisted Mr. Jones, a founding father of Computer Sciences Corporation, in taking the corporate public. That providing helped develop Mr. Wygod’s $20,000 in seed cash into about $50 million by the Nineteen Eighties.
In 1965, Mr. Jones gave Mr. Wygod two horses for his twenty fifth birthday.
“They both won the first time out,” Mr. Wygod stated in 2000. “I was hooked.”
His steady would win greater than a dozen main races over time.
When he was 23, Mr. Wygod began his personal brokerage agency; he bought it three years later for $10 million. The subsequent 12 months, he and two different traders, Bernie Marden and Albert Weiss, bought a controlling curiosity in Glasrock Medical Services, which produced units for the well being care business. By 1982, by promoting most of his curiosity in Glasrock and one other firm, he had parlayed his authentic $2 million funding into $125 million.
Mr. Carr had been an early backer of Medco. Michael Milken, one other earlier investor in Mr. Wygod’s ventures, recalled to The Times in 2000 that an impetus for Medco was a grievance from Lee Iacocca, then the chairman of Chrysler, that pharmaceuticals for auto employees had been costing the corporate a small fortune. Medco negotiated reductions and incentives for workers who purchased lower-priced generic medicine.
“It was one of the great creations of a business, really from scratch,” Mr. Milken stated. He added, “Anything that Marty does, I would invest in, except the horses.”
Actually, the horses had been no exception. The racing operation run by the Wygods recorded profession purse earnings of greater than $21 million, together with $2.8 million of their greatest 12 months, 2009.
In addition to his spouse, Mr. Wygod is survived by their son, Max; their daughter, Ellen; a stepson, Adam Yellin; his sister, Marian; and three grandchildren.
His daughter is an equestrian to whom, together with the bloodstock marketing consultant Ric Waldman, Mr. Wygod gave his 3-year-old colt Resilience, who might rating yet one more notch in Mr. Wygod’s legacy. By successful the Wood Memorial in New York on April 6, Resilience earned a berth within the a hundred and fiftieth Kentucky Derby on May 4.
