A brilliant mining engineer and mining executive, Plato Malozemoff was able to bring Newmont Mining Corporation from basically a holding company with a market value of about $147 million to a major international mining company with a market value of about $2.3 billion. He accomplished this during the 32 years he was Newmont’s Chief Executive Officer.
Among the many successful mining ventures he negotiated and acquired an interest in were Palabora Mining Company in South Africa, Peabody Coal Company, Southern Peru Copper Company, an oil venture in the Dutch North Sea, Atlas Consolidated Mining Development in the Philippines, Highveld Steel and Vanadium Corporation, Ltd., of South Africa, the Telfer Gold Mine in Australia, the Carlin Gold Mining Company, and the Foote Mineral Company.
He carefully nurtured the O’Kiep Copper Company, Tsumeb Corporation, and Magma Copper Company, all of which were very successful operations.
Plato was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, while his father, a graduate of Mining Institute St. Petersburg, was exiled for political activities against the Tsar. During his eight years of exile, his father, an iron and steel metallurgist, was permitted to become the chief operating head of Lena Goldfields, a very significant gold producer on a tributary of the Lena River owned by the British. During that time, Plato decided to become a mining engineer.
After the family fled Russia in 1920, they settled in California. In 1931, in pursuit of his dream, Plato graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with honors. At the height of the Great Depression, he found that a Master’s degree with honors from the Montana School of Mines in 1932 didn’t enhance his chances of finding employment. He finally got a position with the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Butte, Montana, and to supplement his income, a job with the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
He eventually was employed for five years as a metallurgist at Pan American Engineering Company in Berkeley, California before going to Argentina, then Costa Rica as manager of two unsuccessful mining ventures. Here he learned to recognize the seeds of failure and to overcome adversity.
He spent nearly two years in Washington, D.C. with the Premium Price Plan before accepting a mining engineer’s position with Newmont in 1945, going on to taste the fruits of success.
Click here to visit Plato's oral history, which is preserved at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
