David Margolis

Who was David Margolis?

David Israel Margolis was an American industrialist who served as president and chairman of Colt Industries, who was a confidant of former Mayor of New York City Ed Koch.

Margolis was born in the Bronx on January 24, 1930. He attended the City College of New York where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in economics. After graduating, he became the assistant treasurer at Raytheon and treasurer of International Telephone & Telegraph. Margolis met Harold Geneen at a Boston company in the 1950s and followed him to ITT.

He met his wife, the former Barbara Ann Schneider, in 1958, when she was a security officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They married six months later, and moved to New York City in 1959.

Margolis was president of Colt Industries from 1962 to 1995, a firm founded in 1836 by Samuel Colt, and served as the company's chairman from 1984 to 1995. Margolis expanded the company from its original roles as a firearms manufacturer into a producer of machinery for the aerospace, automobile, chemical and petroleum industries, with annual revenues of $1.6 billion as of 1988.