Alan Michael Sugar, Baron Sugar (born 24 March 1947) is a British businessman, entrepreneur and television personality.
Sugar began consumer electronics company Amstrad, in 1968. In 2007, he sold his remaining interest in the company in a deal to BSkyB for £125 million. He was also the chairman and part-owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club from 1991 to 2001, selling his remaining stake in the club in 2007 for £25 million.
He is the host and "boss" of the BBC Television reality competition series The Apprentice, which has been broadcast since 2005. He also assumed the role for The Celebrity Apprentice Australia for Australia's Nine Network in 2021 and 2022.
Sugar was elevated to the House of Lords in 2009 as a Labour peer and was one of the party's biggest donors, but left the party in 2015 and subsequently expressed support for the Conservative Party. He has served as the British government's enterprise champion from 2009 to 2010 and again since 2016, responsible for promoting entrepreneurship and advising the Department for Business and Trade.
Early life
Alan Michael Sugar was born on 24 March 1947 in 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. 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. The 1990s proved a difficult time for the company. The launch of a range of business PCs was marred by unreliable hard disks (supplied by Seagate), causing high levels of customer dissatisfaction and damaging Amstrad's reputation in the personal computer market, from which it never recovered. In the early 1990s, Amstrad began to focus on portable computers rather than desktop computers. Also, in 1990, Amstrad entered the gaming market with the GX4000, but it was a commercial failure, largely because there was only a poor selection of games available.
On 31 July 2007, it was announced that broadcaster BSkyB had agreed to buy Amstrad for about £125m. 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: