Martin J. Wygod, a Wall Street magnate who graduated from racing horses to owning and breeding championship thoroughbreds when he made millions investing in online companies that sold pharmaceuticals by mail and pruned medical records, died on 12 April in San Diego. It was 84.
His daughter, Emily Bushnell, said he died at a hospital of complications from lung disease.
Raised near two tracks in suburban New York and mentored by a software pioneer, an investor and a gambler, Mr. Wygod is said to have been the youngest managing partner of a brokerage firm on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1960s. He became a millionaire before the 30 and in 1993 sold Medco Containment Services to Merck for $6 billion, building it into the nation’s largest prescription drug company and benefits administrator in less 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, president of Princeton Group International, a pharmaceutical consulting firm, commented on the sale to the New York Times in 1994. “Marty Wygod made $6 billion for the himself because he developed a database.”
Mr. Wygod then became chairman of WebMD, a leader in online health information services, which he sold in 2017 for $2.8 billion.
He married Pamela Southern in 1980, and in 1995 they moved from New Jersey to River Edge Farm, a 110-acre property in Buellton, California, where they raised horses and foals to become top racehorses.
Ranked as California’s top thoroughbred breeders in 2006, 2007 and 2008, the pair, both with and without mates, sired 124 stakes winners, according to BloodHorse magazine. They moved their breeding operation to Kentucky in 2010.
Martin Joshua Wygod was born on February 1, 1940 in Manhattan to Max Wygod, an accountant and grocer who had immigrated from Poland, and Rose (Greenwald) Wygod.
His love of horses began when he was a student at Lawrence High School in suburban Nassau County, where he befriended Bobby Frankel, who would become a Hall of Fame trainer. As a teenager, he hung out with classmates at Aqueduct and Belmont Park, where he walked horses to cool them off after practices and races.
After graduating in 1961 from New York University, where his daughter said he studied Hinduism and Buddhism, Mr. Wygod launched his Wall Street career with an initial gift of $20,000 from his mother (equivalent to a little more than $200,000 today).
He told The Times in 2000 that his mentors included Fletcher Jones, who pioneered the commercialization of computer software and introduced Mr Wygod to the technology business. Fred Carr, investment manager. and Manny Kalish, a gambler who did handicap races for New York tabloids and taught Mr. Wygod how to pick winners.
Mr. Wygod helped Mr. Jones, founder of Computer Sciences Corporation, take the company public. That offering helped grow Mr. Wygod’s $20,000 to about $50 million by the 1980s.
In 1965, Mr. Jones gave Mr. Wygod two horses for his 25th birthday.
“They both won the first time out,” Mr. Wygod said in 2000. “I was hooked.”
His stable would win more than a dozen major races over the years.
When he was 23, Mr. Wygod started his own brokerage firm. he sold it three years later for $10 million. The following year, he and two other investors, Bernie Marden and Albert Weiss, bought a controlling interest in Glasrock Medical Services, which produced devices for the health care industry. By 1982, by selling most of his interest in Glasrock and another company, he had pared his initial $2 million investment into $125 million.
Mr. Carr was an early supporter of Medco. Michael Milken, another early investor in Mr. Wygod’s ventures, recalled to the Times in 2000 that one impetus for Medco was a complaint by Lee Iacocca, then Chrysler’s chairman, that prescription drugs for auto workers were costing the company a small fortune. Medco negotiated discounts and incentives for employees who bought generic drugs at lower prices.
“It was one of the great creations of a business, really from the ground up,” Mr. Milken said. He added: “Anything Marty does, I’d invest in, except the horses.”
In fact, horses were no exception. The racing business run by the Wygods recorded career purse earnings of more than $21 million, including $2.8 million in their best year in 2009.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Wygod is survived by their son, Max; a stepson, Adam Yellin; his sister, Marian; and three grandchildren.
His daughter is a rider to whom, along with Bloodstock consultant Ric Waldman, Mr Wygod has sired the 3-year-old colt Resilience, who could carve out another place in Mr Wygod’s legacy. By winning the Wood Memorial in New York on April 6, Resilience earned a spot in the 150th Kentucky Derby on May 4.