Stavros Spyros Niarchos (Grieks: Stavros Spiros Niarchos) (Athene, 3 juli 1909 - Zürich, 16 April 1996) was the Grieks reder.
Niarchos graduated from the university in Jura in 1939 and began working with his uncle. A few months later, he started for his own account. He had noticed that the transport costs for Argentina and the Soviet Union were too high and he started transporting at lower prices. During the Second World War he served as an officer on a destroyer from 1941 to 1945. He became an ere-attaché for seagoing at the Greek Embassy in Washington D.C .. at the same time.
From 1945 he bought low-priced extinct cargo ships from the US Navy, especially tankers. He left it under cheap flags. With the Korean War and the Suez crisis, it hurt him.
In 1952, Niarchos began the construction of supertankers, soon followed by Aristoteles Onassis. Both claimed to be the largest independent tanker shipowner in the world. Niarchos already had 80 tankers. In 1962, he built the Manhattan. This is the largest merchant ship built in the United States. The ship was converted into ice breaker in 1969 and became the first merchant ship of Northwest Transport. Although the trip was successful, it was not commercially viable, after which the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was established.
Niarchos acquired the largest dry dock of the Mediterranean, the Hellenic Shipyards.
He retired in St. Moritz in Switzerland, where he practiced skiing. He married four times and got five children.
He collected art from, among others, van Gogh, Matisse, Goya, El Greco and Peter Paul Rubens. In 1989, he bought Pablo Picasso's self-portrait for $ 47,850,000.
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