2018 0906 - The Washington Post - Richard DeVos, billionaire co-founder of Amway and GOP financial supporter, dies at 92 - [link]
Amway’s business practices also came under scrutiny by regulatory authorities. The company and its Canadian subsidiary paid nearly $60 million to resolve fraud charges in Canada in the 1980s. In 2010 — long after Mr. DeVos retired — Amway paid $34 million to settle a long-running class-action fraud suit in California.
Critics often derided Amway as a cultlike company built on a pyramid-style business model.
“This is an extremely contentious, controversial business model,” business consultant and author Robert L.FitzPatrick told the Detroit Free Press in 2006. “If you go to work for Hewlett-Packard, you don’t walk in the door saying, ‘Hey, I wonder if this is a scam?’ But anybody who gets into multilevel marketing will have to deal with that question.”
In 1977, they bought the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network.
Mr. DeVos was named finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1981, and he helped fund such bedrock conservative organizations as the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, the Christian advocacy group Focus on the Family and the Federalist Society, which seeks to instill conservative ideals in the legal profession.
In 1987, Mr. DeVos was named to the White House AIDS Commission by President Ronald Reagan, but he earned the enmity of gay rights groups through his public comments and his steady opposition to same-sex marriage. He contributed to statewide efforts throughout the country to ban same-sex marriage.