Gordon Getty
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Gordon Peter Getty was born on December 20, 1934. He is the fourth child of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. When his father died in 1976, control of his $2 billion trust was transferred to Gordon.
Getty was raised in San Francisco, California, and earned a B.A. in music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He joined the oil business to please his father; however, he eventually sold the family's Getty Oil to Texaco in 1986 for $10 billion. His current net worth is cited as $2.2 billion, making him the 116th richest person in the United States. Getty helped finance Gavin Newsom's "PlumpJack" businesses, including five restaurants, a Napa winery, a Squaw Valley hotel and resort, and two retail clothing stores. Of Newsom’s eleven enterprises, Gordon Getty was the lead investor in ten.
Getty is one of the nation's leading venture capitalists and philanthropists. In 2002, he donated $3 million to the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, a charitable trust. Though a Republican, he is a major fundraiser for local and national Democratic Party candidates, and has contributed to the campaigns of Nancy Pelosi, Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and John Kerry.
Among a number of professions, Getty is a classical music composer, whose compositions include the opera Plump Jack, Joan and the Bells, and a collection of choral works.
He has four sons with his wife Ann. In 1999, he publicly revealed that he had also fathered three daughters with a Los Angeles woman named Cynthia Beck.
