Richard Lugner, the Austrian billionaire and entrepreneur known as the don of the Vienna Opera Ball who threw A-listers such as Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, Kim Kardashian and Priscilla Presley to the famous event, has died two months after marrying a 42 -year- old bride — his sixth wife.
He was 91.
The construction magnate and socialite had recently suffered health problems and underwent heart surgery, Agence France-Presse reported. He just had married Simone Reiländer on June 1. He died on Monday in his mansion in Vienna.
“Richard Lugner was one successful entrepreneur and a dazzling personalitywrote Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer on X. “An Austrian original that never lost its way. May he rest in peace!”
Lugner gained international fame starting in the 1990s, when he built Lugner City, the country’s seventh largest shopping center at the time, according to Euro News.
In 1992, he began paying international A-listers to visit the mall and then accompany him to the annual Vienna Opera Ball, a star-studded annual affair that is a crown jewel of Austria’s social calendar.
Although Lugner launched the tradition with Harry Belafonte, his subsequent guests included Joan Collins, Pamela Anderson, Kim Kardashian and a host of other female luminaries, including Sophia Loren. Fonda joined him in 2023, and Presley was his latest and final ballroommate in February 2024.
He paid the guests”quite a lot of money“, as Fonda said at the time.
Before Lugner City, the entrepreneur built the foundation of his empire on small-scale projects in the 1960s, then was commissioned to build Vienna’s Islamic Center in 1975, AFP reported.
He also ran for president twice, first getting almost 10% of the vote in 1998, but only 2.4% in 2016.
With News Wire Services