James Crown, a scion of a rich Chicago household who held necessary positions in companies as various as General Dynamics, Sara Lee and JPMorgan Chase, and who grew to become an important early supporter of an up-and-coming politician named Barack Obama, died in Woody Creek, Colo., on Sunday, his seventieth birthday.

Mr. Crown’s household stated in a press release that he died in a single-car accident on the Aspen Motorsports Park racetrack. The assertion offered no additional particulars about how he died.

Mr. Crown was the chief govt of Henry Crown & Company, the household’s privately owned funding agency. The firm is known as for his grandfather, the son of a Lithuanian sweatshop employee, who constructed a household concern that bought sand, gravel, lime and coal right into a Chicago enterprise empire price billions.

James Crown was additionally the lead director and a serious shareholder of the protection and aerospace firm General Dynamics; a former chairman of Sara Lee who helped the corporate cut up into beverage and meals divisions; and a board member of JPMorgan.

An avid philanthropist, Mr. Crown met Mr. Obama in 2003, when he was getting ready to run for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, and have become an enthusiastic supporter.

Mr. Obama had been trounced in a 2000 congressional race towards the Democratic incumbent. His advisers stated he wanted a better connection to Chicago’s Jewish voters. They additionally stated he wanted cash, Mr. Crown offered each.

“I was just taken with his sensibility, his intelligence, his values and how he conducted himself during that campaign,” Mr. Crown informed The New York Times in 2007.

Mr. Crown and his household donated a complete of $112,500 to Mr. Obama in the course of the Democratic main, and Chicago’s Jewish leaders raised hundreds of thousands extra in the course of the marketing campaign. Mr. Obama received the first, then defeated Alan Keyes for the Senate seat and commenced the nationwide political profession that might take him to the White House.

Just a few years later, Mr. Crown grew to become Mr. Obama’s chief presidential fund-raiser in Illinois. When Mr. Obama ran for president in 2008, he launched a listing of earmarks he had secured as a senator, together with $750,000 to help renovate a space center named after Henry Crown on the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

In 2014, Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Crown to the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an unbiased group that advises the president on the effectiveness and objectives of U.S. intelligence businesses.

“When Barack was still an unlikely candidate running for the U.S. Senate, Jim became one of his fiercest advocates and most perceptive advisers,” Mr. Obama and his spouse, Michelle, stated in a statement on Monday. “He believed in our family, and worked hard to convince others across Chicago that they could, too.”

Another beneficiary of Mr. Crown’s largess was the University of Chicago, the place he served as chairman of the board of trustees from 2003 until 2009. The college named its social companies college the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice after Mr. Crown and his spouse, Paula, donated $75 million in 2021.

After Mr. Obama left the White House, Mr. Crown continued to mingle with world leaders, together with President Biden, whom he noticed final week at a state dinner for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

“Jim lived a great Chicago story — one that tied our nation’s industrious past to an ever-hopeful future,” Mr. Biden stated in a statement. “He grew up the great-grandson of a sweatshop worker whose son turned a construction-supply company into an empire. Throughout his own career as a business and civic leader, Jim continued to drive that legacy forward.”

Mr. Crown was a director of Bank One, a client banking large within the Midwest and South, from 1991 till 2004, when JPMorgan acquired it in a deal valued at about $58 billion. He stayed on as a board member after the merger.

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief govt, wrote in a press release that Mr. Crown “has been a trusted adviser for me for nearly 20 years, playing a key role in helping our company navigate numerous business and economic challenges.”

Mr. Crown and two different boardmembers, David Cote and Ellen Futter, drew criticism in 2013 after JPMorgan misplaced greater than $6 billion in a wager on credit score derivatives. The loss drew scrutiny from federal regulators, calls for for extra sturdy threat administration and intense criticism of Mr. Dimon.

James Schine Crown was born in Chicago on June 25, 1953, to Lester and Renée (Schine) Crown. His mom additionally comes from a rich household — her father, J. Myer Schine, made a fortune in actual property and motels — and he or she serves as a director of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and created an honors program at Syracuse University.

Lester Crown was for a few years the main shareholder of General Dynamics. He additionally grew to become a minority proprietor of the Chicago Bulls and the New York Yankees.

The Crown household fortune started with Henry Crown, James’s grandfather, born Henry Krinsky, whose father modified the household title to Crown when Henry was a boy. Henry left college within the eighth grade and, together with his brother, finally began the household development supplies enterprise, which he expanded into railroads, meat packing, motels and, for a time, a serious curiosity within the Empire State Building.

In 2020, Forbes magazine ranked the Crown household the Thirty fourth-richest within the United States, with an estimated price of $10.2 billion.

James Crown graduated in 1972 from New Trier West High School in Northfield, Ill. (now a part of New Trier High School). He earned a bachelor’s diploma in political science from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., in 1976. After finishing a legislation diploma at Stanford, he started working for Salomon Brothers, the New York City funding financial institution.

In 1983, he grew to become a vp at Salomon, the place he met Paula Hannaway, an funding banker. They married in 1985 and moved to Chicago, the place Mr. Crown joined his household’s funding agency.

In addition to his spouse and his mother and father, Mr. Crown is survived by two brothers, Steve and Daniel; 4 sisters, Patricia (often known as PC), Susan, Sara and Janet Crown; three daughters, Torie, Hayley and Summer Crown; a son, W. Andrew Crown; and two grandsons.

Mr. Crown, who saved a house in Aspen, was additionally an avid skier and a managing accomplice of the Aspen Skiing Company, which operates a resort.

The household assertion didn’t say what Mr. Crown was doing at Aspen Motorsports Park when the accident occurred. The park’s website says that members collect twice per week to race, usually a qualifying session adopted by two races with “fast-paced, wheel-to-wheel action” in “Spec Racer Toyotas.”

The racetrack didn’t reply to telephone calls or an electronic mail.

Mr. Crown not too long ago started an effort to deal with gun violence in Chicago by encouraging the town’s enterprise leaders to create hundreds of jobs in underserved areas of the town, offering thousands and thousands of {dollars} for civilian violence intervention packages and shoring up legislation enforcement and low-income communities.

He stated that the hassle would assist Chicago’s higher crust in addition to its lower-income residents.

“You’ve got altruism,” Mr. Crown informed The Chicago Sun-Times. “But you’ve also got the enlightened self-interest of: I want to be safe, I want my workers to come to work, I want the tourists to patronize my business, whatever that may be.”

Emily Flitter contributed reporting.