The Government Employees Insurance Company, usually known by the acronym GEICO, is an American auto insurance company. GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway and, as of 2007, provided coverage for more than 10 million motor cars, trucks and other motor vehicles owned by more than 8 million policy holders. GEICO writes private passenger automobile insurance in the District of Columbia and in all U.S. states except Massachusetts. The company is notable for its television advertising, with several prominent campaigns running simultaneously in national markets.
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The Government Employees Insurance Company, usually known by the acronym GEICO, is an American auto insurance company. GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway and, as of 2007, provided coverage for more than 10 million motor cars, trucks and other motor vehicles owned by more than 8 million policy holders. GEICO writes private passenger automobile insurance in the District of Columbia and in all U.S. states except Massachusetts. The company is notable for its television advertising, with several prominent campaigns running simultaneously in national markets.
History
GEICO was founded in 1936 by Leo Goodwin and his wife Lillian Goodwin to provide auto insurance directly to federal government employees and their families . GEICO's original business model was predicated on the assumption that federal employees as a group would constitute a less risky and more financially stable pool of insureds, as opposed to the general public. Despite the presence of the word "government" in its name, GEICO has always been a private corporation and not a government agency.
A dominant figure in GEICO's history is David Lloyd Kreeger (1919-1990), who became president of the company in 1964 and helped to steer it into a major insurance enterprise. As noted in his New York Times obituary November 20, 1990, Kreeger was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was graduated with high honors from Rutgers and from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of The Law Review. Kreeger joined the Department of Agriculture as a lawyer early in FDR's presidency; he later worked in the Department of the Interior. He then worked for the Justice Department. In 1948, he formed a group of investors who bought into GEICO. He became senior vice president and general counsel of the company.
Six years after becoming president of GEICO in 1964, he was named chairman and chief executive officer. He retained those titles until he retired in 1974. He continued as chairman of the executive committee until 1979, when he was named honorary chairman.
An accomplished amateur violinist, Kreeger was internationally known as a collector of Impressionist and modern painting and sculpture. He was was president and chairman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington for almost 20 years. Today, he is perhaps best known for the Kreeger Museum, a mansion on Foxhall Road in Washington, DC, in which he and his wife, Carmen, also a patron of the arts, lived since 1968. It was designed by the architect Philip Johnson as a showcase for the Kreeger collection.
Intriguingly, the GEICO web site avoids any mention of David Lloyd Kreeger (http://www.geico.com/about/corporate/history/).
In the 1970s, under Kreeger's leadership, GEICO began to insure the general public, after real-time access to computerized driving records became available throughout the United States. In 1996, GEICO became a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.
