Mitt Romney

Biography

Willard Mitt Romney was born in Detroit in 1947, the youngest child of the automobile executive and later Michigan governor George W. Romney. After serving as a Latter-day Saint missionary in France he graduated from Brigham Young University and in 1975 earned joint law and business degrees from Harvard.

He worked at the Boston Consulting Group and from 1977 at Bain & Company, and in 1984 co-founded the private equity firm Bain Capital, which grew into one of the largest in the country. He returned to lead Bain & Company through a financial crisis in 1991-1992. In 1999 he took over the troubled organising committee of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and steered the Games to success.

After losing a 1994 Senate race to Ted Kennedy, he was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and in 2006 signed a health care reform law that extended insurance to nearly all residents. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, won it in 2012 and lost the general election to Barack Obama. Elected senator from Utah in 2018, he became the first senator to vote to convict a president of his own party when he voted to remove Donald Trump in 2020, and voted to convict again in 2021. He retired from the Senate in January 2025.