Peter Munk’s impassioned and gracious speech begins at the 33 minute mark at his $100 million donation to the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, (September 19, 2017) said to be the largest contribution to a Canadian hospital in history. In total, Peter and Melanie Munk have donated more than $285 million to charities and public institutions in Canada and abroad.
Munk extolled Canadian graciousness he experienced when he emigrated here in the late 1940s. “You opened the door. You gave us everything,” he said, referring to Canada as “paradise.”
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A serial entrepreneur, Munk’s ventures ranged from high-end electronics to real estate. But it was as founder of Toronto-based Barrick, the world’s largest gold producer, that he amassed most of his wealth, the bulk of which he pledged would go to charities after his death.
Peter Munk, the Canadian immigrant who founded Barrick Gold Corp. in the early 1980s and transformed it from a small-scale operation into a global empire, has died. He was 90.
He died Wednesday in Toronto, according to a company statement. No cause was given.
A serial entrepreneur, Munk’s ventures ranged from high-end electronics to real estate. But it was as founder of Toronto-based Barrick, the world’s largest gold producer, that he amassed most of his wealth, the bulk of which he pledged would go to charities after his death.
Born in Budapest on Nov. 8, 1927, to Lajos Munk and Katharina Adler, Munk fled Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944 with his father’s family. His mother, who left the marriage when Peter was 4 and had survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, committed suicide in 1988.
In 1948, Munk’s father sent him from an internment camp in Switzerland to live in Canada with an uncle. In a 1998 interview, Peter Munk said he initially dreaded the move. “But I was determined to succeed,” Munk said. “I probably had enough misguided self-confidence to think I could do it in Canada even though I couldn’t speak the language and didn’t have any contacts.”
Munk would later describe his first years in Canada as a kind of love affair. After the deprivation of postwar Europe, food was abundant and friends welcomed him into their homes with open fridges even though he “arrived in this place not speaking the language, not knowing a dog.” He worked a series of odd jobs — selling Christmas trees, harvesting tobacco, clearing bush — and graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in electrical engineering in 1952.
Munk’s account of his childhood and early years in Canada reflected an optimism that remained throughout his life, according to his daughter, Nina Munk, a New York-based journalist. “For my father, the glass is always half full,” she said in a July 2017 interview.
It was a quality that would be tested by the shifts in fortune that are the hallmark of an entrepreneur’s life. Nina was born in 1967, the year Munk’s first business, Clairtone Sound Corp., collapsed. Her father remembered it as “the worst year of his life,” according to her 2008 book about the venture, “The Art of Clairtone.”
For the rest of this article: https://www.thestar.com/business/2018/03/28/barrick-gold-founder-peter-munk-dies-in-toronto-at-age-90.html