NEW YORK — Kirk Kerkorian, the media-shy investor who became one of the richest Americans by betting his money on ventures such as casinos and film studios, died Monday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 98.
Richard E. Sobelle, general counsel of Mr. Kerkorian's investment company, the Tracinda Corp., confirmed the death.
Born poor, Mr. Kerkorian was a brawling amateur boxer, a daredevil pilot, and a high-stakes poker player before figuring out safer ways to amass a multibillion-dollar fortune. He pursued strategies that baffled business rivals and Wall Street analysts and that left him sometimes on the verge of bankruptcy. Other times, his moves brought him windfalls.
He bought and sold MGM three times. He created a commercial airline, sold it, and then purchased it again before reselling it for good. And in his 80s he made an unsolicited but successful bid for Mirage Resorts, the giant casino company controlled by Stephen A. Wynn, the uncrowned king of Las Vegas.
Wynn was not the only mogul to underestimate Mr. Kerkorian. Mr. Kerkorian had earlier outmaneuvered better-known and seemingly more powerful entrepreneurs. Howard Hughes tried to undermine his Las Vegas projects, and Ted Turner mistakenly thought he had bought MGM studios from Mr. Kerkorian for a song.
But Mr. Kerkorian never reveled in his successes and always avoided the limelight.
"What good does it do being rich?" the journalist Dial Torgerson quoted him as saying in the biography "Kerkorian: An American Success Story." "I can't do what I want to do. I don't like to get dressed up and go to see bankers. I hate that kind of thing."
Mr. Kerkorian skipped most shareholder meetings at the companies he owned, and he said little when he did attend. But he resented being portrayed as a recluse.
"I have 30- or 40-year friendships that I prefer to meeting new people," he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1999 in one of his rare interviews.
His close friends included Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra, who often joined him at Los Angeles restaurants and Las Vegas gambling tables.
He was a polarizing figure. Some said he was an unscrupulous manipulator who disregarded the rights of minority shareholders. On occasion he was sued and forced to settle such allegations out of court.
But his defenders maintained that any investors who stuck by him were bound to make big returns.
"Kirk has always made money for people who buy in with him," Lee Isgur, an analyst with Paine Webber, told The New York Times in 1985.
Kerkor Kerkorian — he Americanized his name to Kirk as a boy — was born in Fresno, Calif., on June 6, 1917, one of four children of Armenian immigrants. His mother, Lily, was a homemaker; his father, Ahron, was a fruit merchant whose get-rich-quick schemes often left his family struggling to stay afloat.
"We moved at least 20 times when I was a kid," Mr. Kerkorian told Fortune magazine in 1969. "We often could not pay our rent and would get booted out."
Young Kirk got no further than the eighth grade, leaving school to take odd jobs. He became a promising lightweight boxer, winning 29 of 33 amateur bouts, but quit the ring in 1939 to take flying lessons and soon became a private pilot and later an instructor.
In World War II, Mr. Kerkorian ferried bomber planes across the Atlantic and as far as India for the British Royal Air Force. After the war he purchased surplus military transport planes, refurbished them, and sold them around the world, using the profits to buy a small air charter operation, based in Los Angeles, in 1947.
Mr. Kerkorian often flew Hollywood entertainers into Las Vegas, which was becoming a gambling capital, and joined them at the blackjack and dice tables, where he became renowned as a high roller. It was in Las Vegas where he met Jean Maree Hardy, a dancer and choreographer. They married in 1954 and had two daughters. That marriage ended in divorce after almost 30 years. (His first marriage to Hilda Schmidt had also ended in divorce, in 1951.)
His daughters Tracy Kerkorian and Linda Ross Hilton Kemper as well as three grandchildren survive him, a family spokesman said. (Mr. Kerkorian named his investment firm, Tracinda, which is based in Beverly Hills, after his daughters.)
Mr. Kerkorian bought property in Las Vegas, just off the Strip, in 1962. That year he merged his charter company, Trans International Airlines, with the Studebaker Corp., retaining operating control.
Using Studebaker revenue, he expanded the airline's fleet and destinations. He then repurchased the airline in 1964 and left Studebaker. Over the next three years he sold the airline in two separate transactions, making more than $100 million in overall profits and funneling the proceeds into the three business arenas — airlines, gambling resorts, and film studios — that would sustain him as an investor for the rest of his life. By the end of 1969 Mr. Kerkorian had beaten out the Bronfman family, the Canadian liquor magnates, for control of MGM and amassed almost 40 percent of its shares. Meanwhile, he began to develop his Las Vegas acreage, breaking ground in 1968 for what he promised would be the largest hotel and casino in the world.
The project infuriated Hughes, the reclusive former airline and movie magnate, who had recently moved to Las Vegas intending to dominate the casino and resort business. Hughes announced a huge expansion of his own Sands Hotel, aimed at convincing creditors that Mr. Kerkorian's International Hotel would not be viable in what looked like an overbuilt market. In the end, Mr. Kerkorian found other creditors and completed his hotel on schedule in 1969.
Soon he was facing bigger threats. The 1969-70 recession caught him badly overextended. The Securities and Exchange Commission prevented his holding company, the International Leisure Corp., from making a secondary offering of stock, which would have helped him repay his loans, because the Flamingo Hotel, an International Leisure property, had once been owned by racketeers. Mr. Kerkorian was sinking fast. His International Leisure stock was worth $180 million at the beginning of 1970, but a year later he was forced to sell half his holdings in the company for $16.5 million.
"Sometimes you lose, but that's the nature of the game," he was quoted as saying by Time magazine in 1970. "There's always another game and another chance to win."
He found one when he sought help in shoring up his finances from MGM, in which he had accumulated a controlling share. At his prodding, the MGM board announced that it would build the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, surpassing Mr. Kerkorian's International Hotel as the world's largest gambling and resort hotel. The MGM Grand opened in 1973 with more than 2,000 rooms.