Peter B. Lewis

Lewis was born on November 11, 1933, in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, Joseph Lewis, co-founded Progressive Mutual Insurance Co. with Jack Green in 1937; his mother was the former Helen Rosenfeld. He attended Cleveland Heights High School, and his father died when he was a junior in high school.⁠[1][2][3][3]

At Princeton University, Lewis majored in the Woodrow Wilson School. His senior thesis, titled “The Financially Irresponsible Motorist: A Problem in Practical Politics,” was a study of compulsory automobile insurance and related problems of public policy. As a student he was a letter winner and manager of the varsity crew team and treasurer of the Dial Lodge eating club, and his roommate was Paul Sigler, who later became a molecular biologist at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry.⁠[4][3][3][3][3][3]

After graduating in 1955, he married Toby Devan and joined Progressive, his late father’s company, as an underwriting trainee.⁠[4][3][5]

In 1965, upon Jack Green’s retirement, Lewis and his mother took control of the family insurance company, which had about 100 employees, through a leveraged buyout; the newly formed holding company, The Progressive CorporationProgressive (insurance company)Progressive (The Progressive Corporation) is an insurance holding company headquartered in Mayfield Village, Ohio, whose predecessor, Progressive Mutual Insurance Company, was founded in 1937 by Cleveland lawyers Joseph Lewis and Jack Green; it went public in 1971, and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PGR. Its core business is personal auto insurance, and it also writes commercial auto, motorcycle, boat, RV, and homeowners insurance; based on 2024 premiums it is the second-largest U.S. private passenger auto insurer and the largest commercial auto insurer, and it wrote about $83.2 billion in net premiums in fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, brought Progressive Casualty and three related insurance agencies under the Lewis family’s control. Lewis became president and chief executive officer, and the company’s premium revenue that year was about $7.4 million.⁠[6][3][7][6]

Under his leadership, Progressive focused on drivers whom other insurers turned away, including customers with bad driving records, drivers deemed too young or too old, and owners of fast cars such as Maseratis and Lamborghinis, earning an underwriting profit by charging higher premiums. After Lewis took over, the company adopted a philosophy of preferring underwriting profit to growth and setting rates for a fair profit.⁠[7][1][1][2]

Progressive held its first public stock offering in 1971, and in 1974 it moved its headquarters from downtown Cleveland to Mayfield Village, buying its first pieces of original art at the time of the move. This was the start of the Progressive Art Collection, which acquired 30 artworks that year. Lewis said he wanted to hang modestly priced art by contemporaries of the company’s young employees on the office walls, as a way to communicate respect for creativity, support the careers of young artists, and make coming to work enjoyable.⁠[2][2][8][8][8][8]

Lewis recalled that he had taken two art courses at Princeton and received the worst grades of his life; some 20 years later, while looking for artwork for the company’s new office building, he began meeting art dealers, printmakers, and artists in New York and got hooked on art. His former wife, Toby Devan Lewis, was the collection’s founding curator and in 1985 worked with company leadership to establish the Corporate Art department. Beginning in 1980, Progressive commissioned artists each year to create art for its annual report.⁠[9][9][9][8][8][8]

In the 1980s, Lewis worked with the architect Frank Gehry on a dream home for himself in suburban Cleveland. The two never agreed on what the house should look like, and after 11 years of discussions, with the proposed budget reaching $82 million, Lewis called off the project; the two nevertheless remained friends and continued to work together. In 1997, Gehry compared his years of working for Lewis to receiving a MacArthur “genius award,” saying that during that time he had honed many ideas later realized in other buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.⁠[1][1][10][1]

In 1987, Lewis and his management team introduced Progressive’s Core Values. In 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103 in protest of high auto insurance rates; Lewis saw this as a wake-up call and set a new mission for the company: reducing the human trauma and economic costs of auto accidents.⁠[2][2]

In 1990, Progressive launched its round-the-clock “Immediate Response” claims service. In his letter to shareholders that year, Lewis wrote that the company would create an auto insurance experience that “exceeds consumers’ highest expectations.” The same year, after several top officers left the company, he said he had “fired more Harvard Business School graduates than most other insurance companies have hired.”⁠[3][2][1]

According to his successor as chief executive, Glenn Renwick, Progressive under Lewis reported its results monthly rather than quarterly, and was the first insurer to publicly compare its rates with those of competitors and to ask consumers for input on pricing.⁠[5][5]

Lewis joined the board of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1993 and later became its chairman; by early 2005 he had given the institution more than $77 million, more than any other donor in its history. His gifts included $12 million to help balance the museum’s books, and in 2003 he promised $15 million, on condition that other board members collectively gave $5 million, to renovate the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building on New York’s Upper East Side.⁠[11][11][11][11]

In January 2005, Lewis resigned as chairman of the board, citing differences of opinion with other board members and the museum’s director, Thomas Krens. His spokeswoman, Jennifer Frutchy, said the split stemmed in part from his disagreement with Krens’s financial decisions surrounding plans to open branches in places such as Brazil and Taiwan, and that Lewis also wanted the budget of the New York flagship reined in. Lewis then withdrew his financial support for the museum, though he remained on the committee overseeing the building’s restoration.⁠[11][11][11][1][11]

In 1996, Lewis joined the investor George SorosGeorge SorosGeorge Soros is an American investor and philanthropist, the founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Foundations. He is known for macro trading and for shorting the British pound in 1992, is also a major political donor on the side of the U.S. Democratic Party, and has long been at the center of political controversy and conspiracy theories.Open the full entry, former Men’s Wearhouse chief executive George Zimmer, and University of Phoenix founder John Sperling in funding California’s Proposition 215, the first medical marijuana ballot initiative in the United States. Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, recalled that Lewis, Soros, and Sperling then formed a seven-year partnership in which each contributed $10 million to a couple dozen policy initiatives across the country on medical marijuana, treatment instead of incarceration for people arrested for drug possession, and asset forfeiture reform.⁠[3][3][3]

Between 1997 and 1999, he gave between $1.5 million and $2.5 million to Americans for Medical Rights, a group that advocated only the legalization of medical marijuana, making him one of its three major funders. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) estimated that Lewis had spent more than $40 million on marijuana legalization since the 1980s.⁠[12][12][3]

In 1998, on the recommendation of former president Harold Shapiro, Lewis joined Princeton University’s Board of Trustees, serving on committees including Grounds and Buildings, Student Life, and Honorary Degrees, and he became an emeritus trustee in 2013. Over the years he served the university in 11 different positions.⁠[13][3][3][3][13][14]

He gave Princeton $55 million, of which $35 million went to the nascent Institute for Integrative Genomics. At Lewis’s request, the institute was named the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics after himself and his late roommate, Paul Sigler, and it was dedicated in 2003. Shirley Tilghman, then a molecular biology professor and later Princeton’s president, recalled that the more she emphasized the risks of the project, the more excited Lewis became.⁠[15][12][3][9][10]

In 1999, Lewis gave $36.9 million to Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management to construct the Frank Gehry–designed Peter B. Lewis Building, which bears his name; his gift covered more than half of the building’s roughly $62 million cost. The building, completed in 2002, is known for its undulating stainless steel exterior. Four generations of the Lewis family have attended the university.⁠[7][15][7][7]

Frustrated by the project’s ballooning costs, Lewis demanded that the university’s board resign and for a time stopped giving to all Cleveland charities to pressure the university to revamp its board. “I really get a smile that people think they have a right to even suggest how I give my money away,” he said at the time. After the university shrank its board and introduced term limits, he ended the boycott in 2003.⁠[1][11][1][11][16]

In 2000, after 35 years at the helm of Progressive, Lewis stepped down as chief executive officer and was succeeded by Glenn Renwick; he continued to serve as non-executive chairman of the board. Renwick recalled that Lewis often called himself the company’s “biggest cheerleader.”⁠[17][2][3][5][3]

On January 5, 2000, Lewis, then president and chief executive of Progressive and a Princeton trustee, arrived at Auckland airport in New Zealand to watch the America’s Cup regatta, and drug-sniffing dogs detected cannabis in his briefcase; police later found more cannabis and hashish at another location. He was charged with three counts of drug possession and held for one night.⁠[12][12][18][12][12]

The morning after his arrest he pleaded guilty, and Otahuhu District Court Judge David Harvey discharged him and granted him name suppression; he also made a donation to the drug-rehabilitation center Odyssey House. Police did not believe he intended to distribute the drugs. His lawyer told the court that Lewis used marijuana on his doctor’s advice for pain relief following a partial leg amputation.⁠[12][18][12][3]

Afterward Lewis stopped avoiding the subject, openly acknowledging his long-time use of marijuana and actively working to legalize its sale.⁠[18][18][18]

Lewis had given $1,000 to the presidential campaign of then-Texas Governor George W. Bush in 1999. During the 2004 election, he instead gave heavily to “527” political groups opposing Bush’s re-election: by August 2004 he had given more than $14.1 million over the previous ten months to largely pro-Democratic organizations, including Joint Victory Campaign 2004 ($7.75 million), America Coming Together ($2.99 million), and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund ($2.50 million), becoming the largest disclosed donor in 527 history.⁠[19][20]

By September 30, 2004, his contributions to liberal 527 committees totaled nearly $18.9 million, the most of any individual donor that election cycle and slightly more than George Soros’s $18.2 million; that year he gave more than $20 million in total to Democratic-oriented groups. After John Kerry lost the election, he turned to funding organizations meant to build a permanent infrastructure for Democrats, including the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America.⁠[21][1][1][1]

In January 2006, Princeton University announced that Lewis would give $101 million to broadly expand the creative and performing arts on campus, with plans for a new arts complex, a Society of Fellows in the Arts, and a new center for the creative and performing arts. It was the largest single gift to Princeton on record, and the Lewis Center for the Arts was later named for him; its complex was designed by the architect Steven Holl.⁠[9][9][13][14][13]

He also gave $60 million to build the Frank Gehry–designed Lewis Library, a science library. By 2006 his gifts to Princeton totaled more than $220 million, making him the most generous donor in the university’s modern history. Tilghman said Lewis was passionate about the visual rather than the performing arts, but when she explained why she felt so strongly about a performing arts center, “he barely blinked.”⁠[13][9][13][13]

In 2012, Lewis was the best-known backer of marijuana ballot measures in two states: as of October he had given $1.4 million to a Massachusetts proposal to legalize the sale of medical marijuana and $1.5 million to a Washington initiative to legalize the sale of marijuana to anyone 21 or older. Washington’s Initiative 502 passed that year; Alison Holcomb, its campaign director, said Lewis contributed more than $2 million in all, “significant contributions that made Initiative 502 possible.”⁠[18][18][18][5][5]

In July 2012, Lewis gave $5 million to the Cleveland Institute of Art for a new building in its campus unification project, whose auditorium was named The Peter B. Lewis Theater. It was his largest gift in Cleveland since he ended his boycott in 2003; his local gifts in the meantime had not exceeded $1 million. He said the Uptown development in University Circle had met the hopes he had set out for it in 2004, adding, “It’s the first time in a long time I’ve been impressed by Cleveland.”⁠[22][22][16][16][16]

In September 2012, Lewis was one of 11 new signers of the Giving Pledge, founded by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates. In his letter to Gates and Buffett, he wrote that his contributions over the years totaled nearly $500 million and that he had already given away nearly half his net worth; he had also founded The Management Center to help nonprofit organizations improve their management.⁠[18][18][23][23]

In the letter he wrote that “philanthropy is an unnatural act that must be learned and practiced,” and that seeing results flow from his gifts was his greatest pleasure, “whether exonerating a jailed innocent or completing a Frank Gehry building.” The letter also called for reforming what he called the nation’s “outdated, ineffective” marijuana laws and acknowledged that he was himself one of the patients using marijuana to relieve pain after the amputation of his lower leg. It was the first Giving Pledge letter to call for the legalization of marijuana.⁠[23][23][23][23][18]

Lewis died on November 23, 2013, at his home in Coconut Grove, Florida, at the age of 80; his funeral was held in Cleveland. Under the company’s age limits, he would have retired from Progressive’s board in May 2014. After his death, chief executive Glenn Renwick also took on the role of chairman. At the time of his death, Progressive was the fourth-largest auto insurer in the United States, with more than $16 billion in annual sales and more than 26,000 employees.⁠[5][5][14][13][3][17][17][10]

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero called Lewis “one of America’s great patriots,” and Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber said Lewis was not only a benefactor but a visionary who pushed and enabled the university to aim at ever higher levels of excellence.⁠[24][13]

On February 25, 2014, Oberlin College announced that its planned hotel and conference center would be named the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center, the cornerstone of the college’s Green Arts District, in recognition of Lewis’s $5 million gift. The gift came as a challenge that other donors matched dollar for dollar and was the largest single contribution to the college’s campaign for the Green Arts District; the project’s total cost was estimated at $32 million.⁠[25][25][25][25]

Lewis was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for close to four decades. His gifts to the national ACLU and its Ohio affiliate totaled in the millions of dollars, and he frequently advised the organization’s senior staff; in 2006 he received an award from the national ACLU, and the building housing the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., office carries his name. The issues he cared about included the rights of gay and lesbian people, the protection of reproductive rights, and the decriminalization of drugs. He also supported organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Southern Poverty Law Center.⁠[24][26][26][26][26][10]

In his hometown of Cleveland, Lewis was a collector of modern art and a generous patron of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art; in the late 1960s he took a leading role in founding the New Gallery for Contemporary Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA). In 1990 he received the Cleveland Arts Prize Special Citation for Distinguished Service to the Arts.⁠[15][15][15]

Lewis and Toby Devan had three children before divorcing in 1981; their children include Jonathan D. LewisJonathan Lewis (philanthropist)Jonathan Lewis (Jonathan D. Lewis, 1958–2023) was an American philanthropist, LGBT rights activist, and Miami restaurateur, and the son of Peter B. Lewis, the former chief executive of Progressive Insurance. He funded youth voter mobilization, the direct-action group GetEQUAL, and the same-sex marriage litigation against California’s Proposition 8; Banyan Ridge, his waterfront estate in Miami’s Coconut Grove, was sold by his estate for $101.5 million in December 2025, and the buyer was later identified as Google co-founder Larry Page.Open the full entry. In September 2013, he married his longtime partner, Janet Rosel.⁠[4][26][4]

Lewis favored black Stetson hats, once attended a company board meeting on Halloween dressed as the Lone Ranger, and named his 255-foot yacht the Lone Ranger. Others criticized him as a demanding manager.⁠[1][1]

The Progressive Corporation: Official website: https://www.progressive.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]