🔄 BORN INTO MONEY, CAME BACK TO ZERO AND BUILT IT ALL FROM SCRATCH:

Mohamed Mansour was born in 1948 in Alexandria. He was born into the Mansour family, a dynasty that had established itself as a titan of the cotton industry. In the first half of the 20th century, Egyptian cotton was considered the finest in the world ‘white gold’ and the families who controlled its export operated with the wealth and influence of European nobility.

Mansour attended Victoria College in Alexandria. This institution was the training ground for the Middle Eastern elite.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1952, led by the Free Officers Movement and Gamal Abdel Nasser, marked the end of this era. The Nasser regime enacted sweeping nationalization decrees. The state seized the Mansour family’s cotton trading companies, their land and their assets. Overnight, one of the wealthiest families in Egypt was stripped of its economic foundation.

At the moment of nationalization, Mohamed was in the United States, enrolled at North Carolina State University to study engineering. The seizure of assets in Egypt meant that the flow of funds for his tuition and living expenses was abruptly cut off.

This era is central to Mansour’s personal development. No longer the son of a cotton king, he was a broke foreign American student. To survive, he moved out of his fraternity house into a cramped room and adopted a diet of bread and eggs. He took a job at a local pizza restaurant. He worked for $1.25 an hour as a busboy and waiter.

As if financial ruin were not enough, Mansour faced a life-threatening health crisis at age 20. He was diagnosed with kidney cancer. In the late 1960s, the prognosis for renal malignancies was grim but he ended up defeating it. That was not his first brush with medical disaster. At age 10, he had been hit by a car, shattering his leg. Doctors recommended amputation. The young Mansour refused and a surgeon agreed to a reconstruction that required him to remain bedridden for three years.

The death of Nasser in 1970 and the ascension of Anwar Sadat changed Egypt’s trajectory. Sadat introduced the Infitah (Open Door) policy, shifting Egypt from Soviet-style socialism to a market-oriented economy aligned with the West.

Mohamed returned to Egypt in 1973, shortly before the October War. Alongside his brothers Yasseen and Youssef, he began the task of rebuilding the family name. Their strategy was clear: leverage their American education and cultural fluency to become the gateway for US corporations entering the Egyptian market.