A 24-year-old man walked toward his own airplane on a quiet January morning in Athens, and 15 seconds later, he was lying broken on a runway, gone before his father could even reach the hospital. Within just 29 months, three more members of that same family would be dead. And a Greek newspaper, writing the obituary for the family’s final tragedy, simply called them a dynasty of death. Aristotle Socrates Onassis was born on January 20th, 1906, in Smyrna, a thriving port city then part of the Ottoman Empire.
His comfortable childhood ended abruptly in 1922, when Greek forces were driven out of the region and the city descended into catastrophic violence during what became known as the Great Fire of Smyrna. His family lost virtually everything, and Aristotle fled with barely anything to his name, eventually making his way across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with no more than a modest sum of cash and an overwhelming determination to rebuild what his family had lost. Working first as a telephone operator, and gradually moving into tobacco importing, Aristotle displayed an extraordinary talent for business almost immediately. Within just a few years, he had accumulated enough capital to purchase his first cargo ships during the depths of the Great Depression, buying vessels at rock-bottom prices from companies desperate to offload their fleets.
It proved to be one of the most consequential financial decisions of the 20th century. Over the following decades, Aristotle built an enormous shipping empire, eventually controlling one of the largest privately owned fleets of oil tankers in the entire world, along with substantial holdings in aviation through Olympic Airways. His fortune stretched across private islands, luxury yachts, and an art collection that rivaled those of prestigious museums, all built by a man who had arrived in South America with nothing but ambition. In 1946, Aristotle married Athina Mary Livanos, known to nearly everyone as Tina, the daughter of another powerful Greek shipping magnate.
Tina was just 17 at the time of the wedding. Though the marriage was widely regarded as a genuine love match in its earliest years, the couple would have two children, a son and a daughter, who would each inherit not only their father’s extraordinary wealth, but also a pattern of tragedy that would follow the family for the rest of the century. Their first child, a son named Alexander, was born on April 30th, 1948, followed roughly two and a half years later by a daughter, Christina, born on December 11th, 1950. Both children spent much of their early years being raised across France, Greece, and England, frequently placed in the care of nannies and boarding schools while their father’s business empire consumed the vast majority of his attention.
The marriage between Aristotle and Tina began to unravel by the late 1950s, driven by Aristotle’s increasingly public affair with the world-renowned opera singer Maria Callas. The relationship became one of the most talked-about scandals in international society, and the couple divorced in 1960. For young Alexander and Christina, the divorce marked the beginning of a lifelong pattern of instability, one defined by shifting family loyalties and an ever-present awareness of how publicly their family’s private drama continued to unfold. Aristotle’s relationship with Maria Callas continued for nearly a decade following his divorce, but it too would eventually be cast aside.
In 1968, Aristotle married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of assassinated American President John F. Kennedy, in a union that instantly became one of the most closely watched celebrity marriages of the 20th century. Both Alexander and Christina reportedly pleaded with their father not to go through with the marriage, having developed a genuine distrust of Jacqueline that neither of them ever fully overcame. By the early 1970s, Alexander Onassis had positioned himself as the clear heir apparent to his father’s empire, taking on the role of president of Olympic Aviation.
Alexander had taken his first flying lesson in 1968 and had accumulated roughly 1,500 hours of flight experience, earning a professional pilot’s license and frequently flying medical emergency missions himself. On January 22nd, 1973, Alexander was scheduled to evaluate a potential new pilot named Donald McCusker. The two men, along with Aristotle’s regular pilot, who was recovering from an eye infection, boarded a small amphibious Piaggio aircraft, planning to practice water landings between two nearby Greek islands. Just a few seconds after takeoff from the runway at Athens’ Hellenikon Airport, the plane’s right wing suddenly dropped, and the aircraft crashed within roughly 15 seconds of leaving the ground.
Alexander was left with devastating, unsurvivable head trauma, while both McCusker and the regular pilot survived with serious injuries. Aristotle and his wife, Jacqueline, immediately flew in from New York, bringing along a leading American neurosurgeon in a desperate attempt to save Alexander’s life. Alexander’s mother, Tina, rushed in from Switzerland, and Christina flew in urgently from Brazil. Aristotle even flew a renowned British neurosurgeon named Alan Richardson directly from London to personally examine his son.
The prognosis proved devastating beyond any hope of recovery. Alexander died on January 23rd, 1973, roughly 27 hours after the crash, at just 24 years old, from a brain hemorrhage that no amount of his father’s wealth could reverse. For Aristotle, the loss proved to be an almost unbearable psychological blow from which he never truly recovered. He reportedly grew convinced, at least privately, that the crash had not been a simple accident but rather an act of deliberate sabotage carried out by one of his many business rivals.
He hired his own private investigators to comb through every available detail of the accident. He even briefly considered having his son’s body cryogenically frozen before being persuaded against the idea, choosing instead to have Alexander embalmed and buried on Skorpios, the family’s private Ionian island. But Alexander’s death marked only the beginning of an extraordinarily brutal stretch for the Onassis family. Just over a year and a half after burying her son, Tina, who had since remarried Aristotle’s own long-time shipping rival Stavros Niarchos, died suddenly on October 10th, 1974, at her Parisian home at just 45 years old.
Officially, pathologists attributed her death to acute pulmonary edema, though the circumstances surrounding her passing raised persistent suspicions of a possible drug overdose that were never fully resolved. Her daughter Christina would later pursue legal action against Niarchos over her mother’s considerable estate. Aristotle himself saw his own health deteriorate rapidly throughout this period. He had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a progressive autoimmune disease that gradually weakens the body’s muscles.
Aristotle Onassis died on March 15th, 1975, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, at the age of 69, officially from respiratory failure connected to his illness. Many who knew him best remained convinced that grief itself had done as much to end his life as any physical disease. In the span of just 29 months, Christina Onassis, now the sole surviving child, had lost her brother, her mother, and her father. She was left at just 24 years old as the sole heir to an enormous fortune she had never particularly wanted.
Following her father’s death, Christina inherited roughly 55% of his estate, with much of the remainder directed toward a charitable foundation established in her late brother Alexander’s memory, alongside a settlement provided to her stepmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Christina found herself transformed, almost overnight, into one of the wealthiest women in the world. Her search for stability led her through an extraordinarily turbulent series of marriages. Her first marriage to a middle-aged Los Angeles real estate agent named Joseph Bolker took place in 1971 when Christina was just 20, a union her parents opposed that lasted less than a year.
Just months after her father’s death in 1975, Christina married Alexander Andreadis, an heir to another prominent Greek shipping family, which collapsed within roughly 14 months. In 1978, she married a Russian shipping agent named Sergei Kauzov, a union that ended in divorce the following year. It was Christina’s fourth and final marriage to French businessman Thierry Roussel in 1984 that finally produced the child she had long wanted, a daughter born on January 29th, 1985, whom Christina named Athina in honor of her own late mother. Yet even this marriage proved unable to escape the pattern of betrayal that had defined so much of her adult life.
She discovered that Roussel had fathered a child with his long-time mistress, a Swedish model, during the course of their marriage, with the mistress’s child born only months after Athina herself. Christina ultimately divorced him and chose to raise her young daughter largely on her own. That determination, however, would not be given the time it needed to fully play out. On November 19th, 1988, while staying at a friend’s home in Tortuguitas, just outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, Christina Onassis was found unresponsive in a bathtub by her maid.
She was just 37 years old. An initial autopsy indicated that she had died of a heart attack brought on by acute pulmonary edema, with officials explicitly noting no immediate evidence of suicide, drug overdose, or foul play. Yet subsequent toxicology reports revealed the presence of significant quantities of barbiturates, powerful sedatives, in her system at the time of her death. Investigators ultimately maintained that no evidence pointed toward an intentional overdose, leaving the precise circumstances of her final hours shrouded in ambiguity that has never been fully resolved.
Greek newspapers struggled to find adequate language for what had befallen the family, with one prominent daily describing Christina’s death as closing a circle that carried all the hallmarks of a genuine Greek tragedy, going so far as to label the Onassis family a dynasty of death. Friends who had spoken with Christina in the days before her death insisted she had seemed genuinely happy at the time. Christina’s funeral took place on November 20th, 1988, in a private Greek Orthodox service held at the small chapel on the family’s island of Scorpios. She was buried alongside both her father and her brother, completing a family gravesite that had, within the span of just 15 years, come to hold three members of the same immediate family.
She left behind her only child, 3-year-old Athina, who instantly became, at that impossibly young age, the sole surviving heir to what remained of the once legendary Onassis fortune. Athina Onassis grew up primarily in France under the care of her father, Thierry Roussel, with her upbringing closely overseen by a group of trustees her mother had appointed before her death. These trustees, often referred to in media coverage as the graybeards, maintained tight control over virtually every expenditure made on Athina’s behalf, an arrangement that reportedly grew increasingly tense as Athina moved through her teenage years. By 1992, at just 7 years old, Athina was already being formally recognized in financial reporting as one of the world’s youngest billionaires.
When she turned 18 in 2003, Athina gained access to an inheritance estimated at several hundred million pounds, instantly becoming the wealthiest teenager anywhere in the world. Rather than providing her with security, that inheritance became the source of a prolonged legal battle, as she found herself locked in a dispute with her own father over control of her assets, ultimately seeking to gain full authority over her grandfather’s estate and the charitable foundation established in her late Uncle Alexander’s memory. In the years since, Athina Onassis has built a life centered largely around competitive equestrian sports, establishing her own horse breeding and training operation. She has pursued the sport with genuine seriousness, building an identity distinctly separate from her family’s fortune.
In 2005, she married Brazilian equestrian Alvaro de Miranda Neto, known to many simply as Doda, a union that produced children before the couple divorced in 2017. Athina has largely maintained a deliberately low public profile throughout her adult life, making only rare public appearances. She eventually sold Scorpios, the family’s private island and the final resting place for three generations of her closest relatives, to a trust connected to a Russian entrepreneur, a decision many observers described as marking the true symbolic end of an entire era. What remains today is Athina Onassis, the sole surviving heir to a fortune built from nothing.
Her own choice to step back from public life and build her adult identity around a passion for horses may represent the closest thing to a genuine break from the pattern that has followed the Onassis name for the better part of a century. Whether her own choices ultimately prove enough to finally close the book on what many have long called the Onassis curse remains, for now, a question that only time itself will be able to answer.