Steven Rales

Raised in a Jewish family,^[1] Rales is one of four sons of Ruth (née Abramson) and Norman Rales.^[2] His father was raised in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York and later became a businessman in Washington, D.C. credited for enacting the first employee stock ownership plan transaction in U.S. history.^[3] His father was also a philanthropist, founding the Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation and the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service.^[4][5] In 1969, Rales graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.^[6] In 1973, he graduated from DePauw University, where he was in the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. In 1978, he earned a juris doctor (JD) degree from American University.

In 1979, he left his father's real estate firm to found Equity Group Holdings with his brother Mitchell Rales. Using junk bonds, they bought a diversified line of businesses. They changed the name to Diversified Mortgage Investors in 1978 and to Danaher in 1984, with him serving as its chairman since then.^[7][8] In 1985, they bought Easco Corporation, the then-largest independent aluminum extrusion manufacturer and hand tool manufacturer which produced the Craftsman brand of sockets and wrenches for Sears.^{[citation needed]}

In 1988, they made a hostile takeover bid for Interco, a conglomerate comprising manufacturers as diverse as Converse shoes and Ethan Allen furniture.^[9][10] When the company responded with a poison pill, they sued, and prevailed in court.^[11] They later ended the bid after five months with a profit of $60 million.^[12]

In 1992, the AM side of WGMS was sold off to the Rales brothers who converted the music station into the first frequency for WTEM, the first full-time sports talk radio station in the Washington metropolitan area. He and his brother founded Colfax Corporation in 1995, an industrial pumps manufacturer based in Richmond, Virginia. In 2008, Rales engineered the initial public offering of the company.^[13] Rales also owns a 20% stake in the Indiana Pacers, a National Basketball Association (NBA) team.^[14]

Rales was married to Christine Plank from 1983 to 2003.^[19][20] They have three children: Alexander, Gregory, and Stephanie.^[21][22][23] He married Lalage Damerell in 2012, the mother of writer and former CIA officer Amaryllis Fox Kennedy.

Rales was a major donor in the 2002 dedication of the Peeler Art Center at DePauw.^[24] As of November 2024^[update], he held a net worth of $8.9 billion according to Forbes.^[25]