Martin J. Whitman

Whitman's wife, Lois Whitman, is an attorney and social worker. Since 1994, she has been the founder and director of the Children's Rights Division at the international rights monitoring organization Human Rights Watch. They have three children and six grandchildren. He died on April 16, 2018, at the age of 93 in New York City. His daughter is Tony Award-winning producer Barbara Whitman and his son Yale Law School professor James Whitman.

In February 2012, Whitman announced that he was retiring from active management of the $3.2 billion Third Avenue Value Fund. he will hand over responsibility to his longtime co-manager and protégé, Ian Lapey on March 1, 2012.

Whitman used the quarterly shareholder letters of his fund as a running critique of what he called the "primacy of the income account" ("primacy of the income account" means that corporate wealth is created only by flows, i.e., having positive earnings, and/or cash flows for a period), which he argued serves only short-term speculators rather than long-term investors. For example, in his July 31, 2004 letter Wayback Machine, he wrote that recent developments in GAAP "...increasingly impose unneeded and counter-productive burdens on American corporations, American management and American capital markets. GAAP... ought to be geared toward meeting the needs and desires of creditors rather than the needs and desires of short-term stock market speculators... [T]he amount of money invested in credit instruments of all types in our economy dwarfs the amount of funds invested in equities." Furthermore, "Most private companies, given a choice, seek to enhance [Net Asset Value] by means other than having reported operating income, which is taxable at maximum rates."

As an example of the difference in these perspectives, he discussed the current (as of 2004) controversy over whether stock options ought to be expensed using "fair value method" or "intrinsic value method" and points out that the issue of stock dilution is "a stockholder problem, not a company problem". He pointed out that to a creditor there is "a world of difference in the credit-worthiness of an issuer who... pays out... $200 million per annum in cash for executive compensation... [and one who] issues stock options on a non-dividend-paying common stock with a "fair value" of $200 million" (the point being that the latter is of almost no concern to a creditor).

In particular, he cited as wrongheaded an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal of April 27, 2004, which argued that "financial statements exist to help investors make informed investment decisions". He responded, "That statement is just plain wrong from either a public policy point of view or a creditor's point of view. Financial statements exist to fulfill the needs and desires of many constituencies: managements, creditors, governments, customers, etc." (italics in original).

In 2003, Whitman donated $23 million to Syracuse University which renamed its School of Management after Whitman, becoming the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. The same year, he was elected member of the board of trustees at Syracuse University. He was also an adjunct faculty member at Yale School of Management In 2008, he and his wife founded The Lois and Martin Whitman Scholarship Fund at Tel Aviv University to support the educational needs of Arab-Israeli students. Whitman related his experience as a Jew in the United States, “I spent half my life as a second-class citizen” and his inability to attend Ivy League colleges at the time. Sympathizing with their situation, he told the students it is important “to give scholarships to Arab students at Tel Aviv University." Whitman was a supporter of the Two state solution in Israel.

Whitman was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York. He served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II. Returning to New York state, he graduated from Syracuse University with a B.S. in business administration in 1949. He held an M.A. in economics from the New School of Social Research. He worked for various investment firms in New York City before setting up his own company in 1974, M.J. Whitman & Co. His first big successful investment was his purchase of $100,000 in mortgage bonds issued by the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad. He later sold the bonds for five times his original investment.

Martin J. Whitman (September 30, 1924 – April 16, 2018) was an American investment adviser and a strong critic of the direction of recent changes in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in the U.S. He was founder and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Third Avenue Management, and Portfolio Manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund.