Red Bull began with a jet-lagged toothpaste salesman in Bangkok
Dietrich Mateschitz was marketing toothpaste for a German cosmetics firm when, riding from Bangkok airport into the city, he bought a bottle of a Thai tonic called Krating Daeng. One glass, he said, and his jet lag vanished. He spent the next three years reworking it into Red Bull, and ended up a multibillionaire.
Mateschitz was born in 1944 in a small Styrian town to two schoolteachers and took a leisurely ten years to finish his marketing degree in Vienna, graduating in 1972. He sold detergents for Unilever before moving to Blendax. The Thai drink he stumbled on was already popular with truck drivers and factory workers, so he approached its maker, Chaleo Yoovidhya, and the two founded Red Bull GmbH in 1984. After roughly three years of tinkering with the formula, they launched it in Austria in 1987.
The brand grew into the world's leading energy drink largely through marketing built around extreme sports, from cliff diving and surfing to mountain biking. The most spectacular example came in October 2012, when the Red Bull Stratos project sent Felix Baumgartner skydiving from the edge of space, a moment seen as a turning point for the company's image.
Motor racing became his other obsession. In November 2004 he bought Ford's struggling Jaguar Formula One team for $1, renamed it Red Bull Racing, hired Christian Horner to run it and paid designer Adrian Newey a reported $10m salary. With Gerhard Berger he also bought Minardi as a junior squad. Sebastian Vettel won for that sister team in 2008, and Red Bull Racing then took both world titles four years running from 2010. Max Verstappen brought the drivers' crown back in 2021 and kept it in 2022.
Despite owning two teams and a society magazine, Mateschitz shunned celebrity life and watched most races on television. He held 49 percent of the company and was worth an estimated 27.4 billion dollars in April 2022, months before he died. Red Bull's in-house engines, arriving from 2026, carry his name.
Source: Dietrich Mateschitz
