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NEW YORK (AP) — Leonard Lauder, a renowned philanthropist who expanded the family cosmetics business into a worldwide empire, has died at the age of 92.

Estee Lauders Cos. announced the news in a release on Sunday and said he died on Saturday surrounded by family.

Lauder, the oldest son of Estee and Joseph H. Lauder, who founded the company in 1946, formally joined the New York business in 1958. Over more than six decades, Lauder played a key role in transforming the business from a handful of products sold under a single brand in U.S. stores to a multi-brand global giant. He had held the title of chairman emeritus at the time of his death.

Estee Lauder’s products are sold in roughly 150 countries and territories under brand names including Clinique and Aveda, according to the company’s latest annual report. The company generated sales of nearly $16 billion in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, the filing said.

Estee Lauder went public in 1995, but members of Lauder family still have about 84% of the voting power of common stock, according to the latest annual filing.

Lauder served as president of The Estée Lauder Cos. from 1972 to 1995 and as CEO from 1982 through 1999. He was named chairman in 1995 and served in that role through June 2009.

Under his stewardship, Lauder created the company’s first research and development laboratory, brought in professional management at every level, and was the impetus behind The Estée Lauder Cos.’ international expansion, helping to spearhead the company’s sales and profits exponentially, according to the company.

Lauder led the launch of many brands including Aramis, Clinique, and Lab Series, among others. Until his death, he remained deeply involved in the company’s acquisition strategy, including the acquisitions of such brands as Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Jo Malone London and MAC, the company said.

During his years as chairman emeritus, Lauder was closely involved in the business and day-to-day operations and was a constant fixture at its global headquarters in New York and at its stores around the world until the time of his death, the company said.

“Throughout his life, my father worked tirelessly to build and transform the beauty industry, pioneering many of the innovations, trends, and best practices that are foundational to the industry today,” said William P. Lauder, son and chair of the board at The Estée Lauder Companies in a statement. “He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer’s and breast cancer. ”

Lauder was a longtime patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, in 2013, pledged his 78-piece collection of Cubist art to the museum in the largest single philanthropic gift in the museum’s history. He later added five major works to that pledged gift, the company said.

In concert with his Cubist collection donation, he helped establish the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Met to support a program of fellowships, focused exhibitions, and public lectures. He also was the Whitney Museum of American Art’s chairman emeritus and a trustee from 1977 to 2011.

Lauder was married to Evelyn H. Lauder, who had been the senior corporate vice president at the cosmetic company and the founder of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, from 1959 until she passed away in 2011.

On Jan. 1, 2015, Lauder married Judy Glickman Lauder, a philanthropist and internationally recognized photographer.

Lauder was born in 1933 in New York City. He was a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and the Officer Candidate School of the United States Navy.

Lauder studied at Columbia University’s graduate school of business. He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and as a Navy reservist, for which the U.S. Navy Supply Corps Foundation later recognized him with its Distinguished Alumni Award.

In addition to his wife and son William, Lauder is survived by his other son Gary M. Lauder and wife, Laura Lauder; five grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, many stepchildren and step grandchildren, as well as his brother, Ronald S. Lauder, and wife, Jo Carole Lauder, and their daughters, Aerin Lauder and Jane Lauder.

While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy.

How so? Well, the Navy’s chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a nightmare for startups.

The efforts represent a less visible but potentially more meaningful remaking that aims to see the government move faster and be smarter about where it’s committing dollars.

“We’re more open for business and partnerships than we’ve ever been before,” Fanelli told TechCrunch in a recent Zoom interview. “We’re humble and listening more than before, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do business differently, we want that to be a partnership.”

Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated through what Fanelli calls the Navy’s innovation adoption kit, a series of frameworks and tools that aim to bridge the so-called Valley of Death, where promising tech dies on its path from prototype to production.

“Your granddaddy’s government had a spaghetti chart for how to get in,” Fanelli said. “Now it’s a funnel, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outsized outcomes, then we want to designate you as an enterprise service.”

In one recent case, the Navy went from a Request for Proposal (RFP) to pilot deployment in under six months with Via, an eight-year-old, Somerville, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity startup that helps big organizations protect sensitive data and digital identities through, in part, decentralization, meaning the data isn’t stored in one central spot that can be hacked. (Another of Via’s clients is the U.S. Air Force.)

The Navy’s new approach operates on what Fanelli calls a “horizon” model, borrowed and adapted from McKinsey’s innovation framework.

Companies move through three phases: evaluation, structured piloting and scaling to enterprise services. The key difference from traditional government contracting, Fanelli says, is that the Navy now leads with problems rather than predetermined solutions.

“Instead of specifying, ‘Hey, we’d like this problem solved in a way that we’ve always had it,’ we just say, ‘We have a problem, who wants to solve this and how will you solve it?’” Fanelli said.

Fanelli’s drive to overhaul Navy tech is personal. Originally a scholarship cadet in the Air Force studying electrical engineering, he was disqualified from military service due to a lung issue. Determined to serve anyway, he chose the Navy over private sector offers more than 20 years ago because he “wanted to be around people in uniform.”

Since then, his career has spanned roles across defense, intelligence, DARPA and open source initiatives, before returning to the Department of the Navy.

The change he’s overseeing is opening doors to companies that previously never considered government work and may have thought it a waste of time to try.

Fanelli points, for example, to one competition run through the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), wherein the Navy expected a handful of bidders for a niche cybersecurity challenge but received nearly 100 responses — many from companies that had never worked with the DOD before but were already solving similar problems in the private sector.

Fanelli says his team has documented dozens of success stories altogether, including a venture-backed startup that used robotic process automation to zip through a two-year invoice backlog in just a couple of weeks. Another example involved rolling out network improvements to an aircraft carrier that saved 5,000 sailor hours in the first month alone.

“That not just changed their availability, but it changed their morale, esprit de corps, how much time they could spend doing other tasks,” Fanelli noted, explaining that time saved is one of five metrics that the Navy uses to measure the success of a pilot program. The other four are operational resilience, cost per user, adaptability and user experience.

As for what the Navy is looking for right now, Fanelli outlined several high-priority areas, including AI, where the service is actively talking with teams.

The Navy apparently wants to accelerate AI adoption beyond basic generative AI use cases into more agentic applications for everything from onboarding and personnel management to data processing on ships.

He also cited “alternative” GPS, explaining that the Navy is quickly adopting alternative precision navigation and timing software, particularly for integration with unmanned systems. And he mentioned “legacy system modernization,” saying that some of the aging technology that the Navy is looking to update includes air traffic control infrastructure and ship-based systems.

So, how much money is it looking to put to work each year? Fanelli said he wasn’t at liberty to provide specific budget breakdowns, but he said the Navy currently allocates single-digit percentages to emerging and commercial technology versus traditional defense contractors — a balance that he expects to evolve significantly as AI continues to advance.

As for the most common reason that promising technologies fail when trialed, he said it isn’t necessarily because of technical shortcomings. Instead, he said, the Navy operates on long budget cycles, and if a new solution doesn’t replace or “turn off” an existing system, funding becomes problematic.

“If we’re getting benefit and we’re measuring that benefit, but there’s no money [getting to the startup] in a year and a half — that’s a really bad story for their investors and our users,” Fanelli explained. “Sometimes it’s a zero sum game. Sometimes it’s not. And if we’re going to flip the public-private sector to more private and ride that wave, we do have a lot of technical debt that we need to cut anchor on.”

Before ending our call, we asked Fanelli if the Trump administration’s “America first” policies are impacting these processes in any way. Fanelli answered that the current focus on domestic manufacturing aligns well with the Navy’s “resilience” goals. (Here, he pointed to ongoing initiatives like digital twins, additive manufacturing and onsite production capabilities that can reduce supply chain dependencies.)

Either way, the Navy’s message for entrepreneurs and investors is very clearly that it’s a genuine alternative to traditional commercial markets, and it’s a pitch that appears to be gaining traction in Silicon Valley, where there’s growing receptiveness to partnering with the U.S. government.

Said Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth at a recent Bloomberg event in San Francisco: “There’s a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for.”

It’s a marked change from the more skeptical stance that characterized much of the Valley in previous years, as longtime industry observers can attest.

Now, Fanelli — who has been making the rounds, taking with business media outlets and podcast interviewers — hopes to attract more of that interest to the Navy specifically.

“I would invite anyone who wants to serve the greater mission from a solution perspective,” he told TechCrunch, “to lean in and to join us in this journey.”

If you’re interested in hearing our full conversation with Fanelli, you can check it out right here.