George Joseph (West Virginia)

George Joseph, founder of Mercury Insurance Group of Los Angeles, was born in West Virginia in 1921. The son of a West Virginia restaurateur of Lebanese origin, he served as a B-17 navigator in World War II, serving in some 50 missions, and then attended Harvard. After earning a degree in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard in 3 years (on the GI Bill) in 1949, he began selling life insurance in Los Angeles, CA.

By day, he worked for Occidental Life, as a systems analyst and later as a salesman. By night, he sold life insurance door-to-door. In 1954, he left Occidental to open his own agency.

He eventually started his own insurance agency in California selling both life insurance and property/casualty insurance. Frustrated by the limitations of the insurance companies of the day only offering insurance for one type of client (i.e. "preferred" or "non-standard"), he founded Mercury Insurance in April 1962 to offer auto insurance policies for all the different types of drivers an independent insurance agency might have, thus eliminating an agent's need to have contracts with a multitude of different insurance carriers.

The company was founded in 1961 and George Joseph has been active as its leader during its entire existence. George Joseph was active in the opposition of the controversial California Proposition 103 which regulated providers of insurance to individuals in California. Proposition 103 requires insurance carriers to file rates and receive prior approval before using the rates, and required all insurance carriers to roll back rates 20%. George Joseph fought to repeal parts of this law in 1993 based on the grounds that the law promoted increased litigation in the insurance industry and that the law restricted insurance carriers preventing their competitive actions.

In 2006 George Joseph was listed with a net worth of $1 billion on the Forbes 400. He still remains an actively involved in the operations of Mercury Insurance as the Chairman of the Board, however the CEO of the company is now Gabe Tirador.

External links

* [http://www.mercury.org/PROJECT/History.htm/ History of Mercury]
* [http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/6RNR.html/ George Joseph, The World's Richest People]