Paul Loup Karl Sulitzer (22 July 1946 – 6 February 2025) was a French financier and author. Before he turned seventeen, he was already a self-made millionaire. Sulitzer used his financial experience and knowledge in his books, which often related to the business world.
Many of his books were ghost-written by Loup Durand.
Life and career
Sulitzer's father was a Jewish immigrant from Romania who died when Sulitzer was 10. Six years later Sulitzer joined a trading company that operated in the Middle East. According to his editor, he became the youngest CEO in France at age 21 and made his fortune selling gadgets (notably keychains that were very popular between the years 1960 and 1970) in the UK that he imported from the Far East. In 1968 he incorporated a holding company and established a financial consultant firm.
In 1980, Sulitzer pitched a literary genre concept he called “finance Western” to Denoël Publishers that would be a series of finance-fiction adventure novels. Loup Durand, a journalist and writer, did the writing. The book Money reached a large audience. This was followed by Cash! (1981) and Fortune (1982) which depicted the exploits and financial dreams of Franz Cimballi, a vigilante businessman.
After these thrillers of a new genre, the duo published Le Roi Vert (1983). It was a romantic saga that achieved considerable public success and was translated into 30 languages.
At the end of the 1980s, he was a lecturer, with François Spoerry, Jean-Pierre Thiollet and others, to an international meeting in Geneva of Amiic (World Real Estate Investment Organization).
In 2000, he was arrested, along with the son of the former socialist president François Mitterrand, for the illegal sale of weapons to Angola.
Sulitzer died from a stroke on 6 February 2025, at the age of 78.