Warren Van Dyke "Pete" Musser (December 15, 1926 – November 25, 2019) was the chairman of the Musser Group. He was the founder of

Safeguard Scientifics Warren Van Dyke "Pete" Musser (December 15, 1926 – November 25, 2019) was the chairman of the Musser Group. He was the founder of Safeguard Scientifics, a venture capital firm that invested in technology companies. At the peak of the dot-com ...

, a

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

firm that invested in technology companies. At the peak of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

, Musser was a

billionaire A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least one billion (1,000,000,000, i.e., a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling. The American busi ...

on paper; however, when the bubble burst, he lost almost his entire fortune. Musser was a philanthropist and The Musser Foundation has donated over $50 million to organizations including the

Boy Scouts of America The Boy Scouts of America (BSA, colloquially the Boy Scouts) is one of the largest scouting organizations and one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with about 1.2 million youth participants. The BSA was founded in ...

. Musser has served on the

board of directors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit orga ...

of the

Cradle of Liberty Council The Cradle of Liberty Council (#525) is a Boy Scouts of America council created in 1996 with the merger of the former Philadelphia Council (covering the city and county of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) and the former Valley Forge Coun ...

. The Musser Award for Excellence in Leadership from

Fox School of Business and Management The Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management is the business school of Temple University. Located in Philadelphia, the Fox School offers several Master of Business Administration programs (full-time MBA, part-time MBA, international MBA, ex ...

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell and his congregation Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia then calle ...

and the

Musser Scout Reservation Musser Scout Reservation is a Boy Scouts of America camp located along the Unami Creek on over of Marlborough Township, Pennsylvania. The Reservation is made up of three distinct camps: Camp Delmont, Camp Hart, and Camp Garrison. The reservatio ...

Montgomery County, Pennsylvania Montgomery County is a County (United States), county in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is the List of counties in Pennsylvania, third-most populous county in Pennsylvania and the List of the most populous cou ...

, are named after Musser.

Early life and education

Musser was born in the

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Harrisburg is the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Dauphin County. With a population of 50,135 as of the 2021 census, Harrisburg is the 9th largest city and 15th largest municipality in ...

, area on December 15, 1926 and earned a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in Industrial Engineering at

Lehigh University Lehigh University (LU) is a private research university in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. The university was established in 1865 by businessman Asa Packer and was originally affiliated with the Epi ...

in 1949.

Career

In 1952, at the age of 25, Musser went to work as a stockbroker trainee for Hornblower & Weeks. The next year, he left the company with others to form their own company. In 1955, his company acquired Safe-Guard Corporation and in 1966, Musser's firm changed its name to Safeguard Industries. Musser invested in technology companies in Philicon Valley such as QVC,

Comcast Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...

, and

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the le ...

, which resulted in a $200 million profit. In March 1996, when Ken Fox and Walter Buckley left Safeguard Scientifics to form Internet Capital Group (later Actua Corporation), they asked Musser for $5 million in funding, but he insisted on investing $15 million. At the height of the

, the company had a market capitalization of almost $60 billion, making Musser a paper

. Musser was a director of TyCom, a subsidiary of

Tyco International Tyco International plc was a security systems company incorporated in the Republic of Ireland, with operational headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, United States (Tyco International (US) Inc.). Tyco International was composed of two major b ...

, and in December 2000, he borrowed $14.1 million from Tyco executives

Dennis Kozlowski Leo Dennis Kozlowski (born November 16, 1946) is a former CEO of Tyco International, convicted in 2005 of crimes related to his receipt of $81 million in unauthorized bonuses, the purchase of art for $14.725 million and the payment by Tyco of a $ ...

and Mark H. Swartz On November 29, 2000, after the burst of the

, to repay a loan, Musser was forced to sell 6.5 million of his shares in Safeguard Scientifics for $8.25 per share, or $53.7 million. The stock price was down over 90% from the peak of $99 per share 9 months earlier. This left him with 560,000 shares in the company. In 2003, Musser defaulted on a $26.5 million loan from Safeguard Scientifics. Musser was a member of the board of directors of

Brandywine Realty Trust Brandywine Realty Trust is a real estate investment trust that invests in office buildings in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Austin. As of December 31, 2019, the company owned interests in 173 properties containing 24.3 million net rentab ...

from 1996, when the company acquired properties from a joint venture of Safeguard Scientifics, until 2002.

Personal life

Musser married and divorced Betty K. Musser (née Umstad) and then Hilary Grinker Musser, who was 39 years younger than him. Musser's son, Craig, a renowned kaleidoscope artist under the name Van Dyke, was partnered with Bruce Darda, a New York based tech executive, at the time of his death from AIDS in 1986. Musser spent lavishly on his residences, building his-and-hers tennis courts on his Nantucket residence and spending $100,000 on special garage doors. Musser also was a contributor to Republican causes. He died on November 25, 2019.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Musser, Pete 1926 births 2019 deaths 20th-century American businesspeople American chief executives American financial businesspeople Businesspeople from Philadelphia Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Lehigh University alumni Pennsylvania Republicans People from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 20th-century American philanthropists