Alan Sugar

Alan Michael Sugar was born on 24 March 1947 in Clapton, Hackney, East London, into a Jewish family. His father, Nathan, was a tailor in the garment industry of the East End. His maternal grandparents were born in Russia, and his paternal grandfather was born in Poland. Sugar's paternal grandmother, Sarah Sugar, was born in London to Polish parents.

When Sugar was young, his family lived in a council flat. Because of his profuse, curly hair, he was nicknamed "Mop head", a name that he still goes by in the present day. He attended Northwold Primary School and then Brooke House Secondary School in Upper Clapton, Hackney, and made extra money by working at a greengrocers. After leaving school at the age of 16, he worked briefly for the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of Education.

In 1968, aged 21, Sugar set up Amstrad with £100 of Post Office savings. He started off selling radio aerials for cars and other electrical goods out of a van which he had bought for £50 and insured for £8.

The name of the company was formed from his initials and the first four letters of the word 'trading': Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It began as a general importer/exporter and wholesale; by 1970 the first manufacturing venture was underway. He achieved lower production prices by using injection moulding plastics for hi-fi turntable covers, severely undercutting competitors who used vacuum-forming processes. In the mid 1970s manufacturing capacity was expanded to include the production of audio amplifiers, stereo cassette recording decks and AM/FM radio tuners, on most cases beating the competition on price.

In 1980, Amstrad was listed on the London Stock Exchange and during the 1980s Amstrad doubled its profit and market value every year. By 1984, recognising the opportunity of the home computer era, Amstrad launched an 8-bit machine, the Amstrad CPC 464. Although the CPC range were attractive machines, with CP/M-capability and a good BASIC interpreter, it had to compete with its arch-rivals, the more graphically complex Commodore 64 and the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum, not to mention the highly sophisticated BBC Micro. Despite this, three million units were sold worldwide with a long production life of eight years. It inspired an East German version with Z80 clone processors. In 1985, Sugar had another major breakthrough with the launch of the Amstrad PCW 8256 word processor which retailed at over £300, but was still considerably cheaper than rival machines (such as the Apple Macintosh Plus, which retailed at $2,599). In 1986, Amstrad bought the rights to the Sinclair computer product line and produced two more ZX Spectrum models in a similar style to their CPC machines. It also developed the PC1512, a PC compatible computer, which became quite popular in Europe and was the first in a line of Amstrad PCs.

In 1988, Stewart Alsop II called Sugar and Jack Tramiel "the world's two leading business-as-war entrepreneurs". The 1990s proved a difficult time for the company. …

After a take-over battle with Robert Maxwell for ownership of Tottenham Hotspur, Sugar teamed up with the club's manager Terry Venables and bought it in June 1991. Although his initial investment helped ease the financial troubles the club was suffering at the time, his treatment of Tottenham as a business venture and not a footballing one made him an unpopular figure among the club's fans. In Sugar's nine years as chairman, Tottenham Hotspur did not finish in the top six in the league and won just one trophy, the 1999 League Cup.

After being sacked as the club's chief executive by Sugar in 1993, Venables appealed to the high courts for reinstatement. A legal battle for the club took place over the summer, which Sugar won (see Re Tottenham Hotspur plc [1994] 1 BCLC 655). The decision to sack Venables angered many Tottenham fans, and Sugar later said, "I felt as though I'd killed Bambi."

In 1992, Sugar was the only representative of the then "big five" (Arsenal, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur) who voted in favour of Sky's bid for Premier League television rights. The other four voted in favour of ITV's bid, as it had promised to show big five games more often. At the time of the vote, Sugar's company Amstrad was developing satellite dishes for Sky, though Sugar had declared this prior to the vote. During negotiations, Sugar called Sky CEO Sam Chisholm and angrily ordered him to "blow [ITV] out of the water" with a much higher bid.

In 1994, Sugar financed the transfers of three players of the 1994 FIFA World Cup: Ilie Dumitrescu, Gica Popescu, and Jürgen Klinsmann, who in his first season in English football, was named FWA Footballer of the Year. Because Spurs had not qualified for European competition, Klinsmann decided to invoke an opt-out clause in his contract and left for Bayern Munich in the summer of 1995. Sugar appeared on television holding the last shirt Klinsmann wore for Spurs and said he would "not wash his car with it". He referred to foreigners coming into the Premier League at high wages as "Carlos Kickaballs". Klinsmann retaliated by calling Sugar "a man without honour", and said:

"He only ever talks about money. He never talks about the game. I would say there is a big question mark over whether Sugar's heart is in the club and in football. …

Sugar became the host of the BBC reality show The Apprentice, which has had one series broadcast each year from 2005, in the same role as Donald Trump in the US version. He fires at least one candidate each week until only one candidate is left. Until 2010, the winner was then employed in his company and since 2011 wins a partnership with Sugar, including his investment of £250,000 to establish their own business.

As a condition for appearing in the third series, Sugar placed a requirement that the show be more business-oriented rather than just entertainment and that he should be portrayed in a less harsh light, to counter his somewhat belligerent reputation. He also expressed a desire that the calibre of the candidates should be higher than those who had appeared in the second series (who had come across as manifestly lacklustre) and that the motives of the candidates for participating are scrutinised more carefully, given that certain candidates in previous series had used their successful experience in the show as a springboard to advance their own careers (as occurred with Michelle Dewberry, the winner of the second series, who left Amstrad's employment only eight months after taking up the job). In September 2013, Sugar lost his Employment tribunal counter-claim against Stella English, the 2010 winner of The Apprentice.

Sugar has criticised the US version of The Apprentice because "they've made the fatal error of trying to change things just for the sake of it and it backfired."

In September 2020, it was announced that Sugar will be the new CEO on The Celebrity Apprentice Australia on Australia's Nine Network, replacing former CEO Mark Bouris.

Young Apprentice (Junior Apprentice in series 1) was a British reality television programme spin-off in which a group of twelve young people, aged 16 and 17, competed to win a £25,000 prize from Sugar. The six-part series began on BBC One and BBC HD on 12 May 2010, and concluded on 10 June. It featured Nick Hewer and Karren Brady as Sugar's advisors. Brady made her debut on Junior Apprentice; it aired before she appeared on the adult version. The programme concluded with Sugar awarding the prize fund to 17-year-old Arjun Rajyagor. Tim Ankers finished in second place.

The second series started in October 2011, and featured eight episodes and twelve contestants. …

Sugar has stated that he is an atheist, but remains proud of his Jewish heritage. He married Ann Simons, a former hairdresser, on 28 April 1968 at Great Portland Street, London. They have two sons, Daniel and Simon, and a daughter, Louise. The couple formerly lived mainly in Chigwell, Essex.

On 10 June 2020, Sugar, a pilot since 1975, announced that he was taking delivery of a new 2020 Cirrus SR22T single-engine aircraft. During an attempted landing in his Cirrus at the grass airfield Manchester Barton Aerodrome on 5 July 2008, he overshot the runway after touchdown due to poor weather and wet field conditions. No injuries were sustained, although the plane was slightly damaged and consequently grounded.

In 2023, Sugar had an estimated fortune of £1.02 billion.

In the 2020s, Sugar relocated to Australia permanently as a tax exile to help mitigate his UK tax liability. The move backfired when his financial advisers failed to take account of 2010 tax reforms that apply to peers of the realm. As a result, Sugar paid £186m to HMRC for tax owed on share dividends that he received from his company Amshold in 2021, amounting to £390m.

In February 2009, it was reported that Sugar had initiated legal proceedings against The Sun newspaper following a report that he had been named on a "hit list" of British Jews in response to Israel's ongoing military operation in Gaza. The threats are alleged to have been made by Glen Jenvey, the source of the original story in The Sun, who posted to a Muslim website under a false identity.

In February 2022, 70-year-old Patrick Gomes was jailed for three years and six months for sending antisemitic death threats to Sugar, in response to his comments on antisemitism in the Labour Party.