These new philanthropists view the current foundation model, built on the fortunes of earlier industrial titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller, as hidebound and often ineffective.

From steelmakers to telephone companies, free health and defined pension checks were a staple of the retirement packages negotiated between America's industrial titans and their unions half a century ago.

As a captain of industry and the richest man in America, William H. Gates has often been compared to industrial titans of the past.

Like virtually all of this country's industrial titans, Gardini also controls a major newspaper, Il Messaggero.

Italy alone, in a tradition going back many years, has had all its important newspapers snatched up by a handful of industrial titans with interests that extend far beyond the gathering of news.

Raul Gardini, one of Italy's industrial titans, unexpectedly resigned today as chairman of Ferruzzi Finanziaria S.p.A., the country's second-largest private company.

International One of Italy's industrial titans resigned unexpectedly as chairman of Ferruzzi Finanziaria, the country's second-largest private company.

Nor have Russia's oligarchs disappeared, despite a belief among some political and financial analysts that Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest foreshadowed a widespread purge of the country's industrial titans.

And few, presumably, are as salient as the mass layoffs by industrial titans that are now standard fare on the evening news.

He is also at work on two residences: one for a shipping magnate on the outskirts of town and another for one of Russia's new industrial titans in Moscow.