David Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet

, Thomson is the richest person in Canada and 21st richest in the world, with an estimated net worth of $61.3 billion USD.

David Kenneth Roy Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet (born 12 June 1957), is a Canadian/British hereditary peer and media magnate.

He was born on June 12, 1957 in Toronto, Ontario, the eldest child of Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet, and his wife, Marilyn Lavis.

He has a sister named Taylor Thomson, and his brother, Peter Thomson, is a race car driver.

"David, my grandson, will have to take his part in the running of the Organisation and David's son, too," Roy Thomson wrote in his 1975 autobiography.

"With the fortune that we will leave to them go also responsibilities. These Thomson boys that come after Ken are not going to be able, even if they want to, to shrug off these responsibilities."

In 1978, Thomson received his Bachelor of Arts (subsequently upgraded to an MA (Cantab)) at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he studied History.

As a child, he attended both Upper Canada College and the Hall School.

Thomson started his business career as a junior associate at McLeod Young Weir in Toronto.

He left the firm to enter the family business, working in a number of positions in companies controlled by the Thomson family.

Thomson was manager of The Bay store at Cloverdale Mall in Etobicoke, and president of Zellers.

In an effort to develop his independence, Thomson founded the real estate firm Osmington Incorporated, owned and operated outside of the Thomson empire.

Osmington acquires and manages commercial real estate assets on behalf of institutional shareholders, such as the Thomson empire.

In 1984, he acquired J. M. W. Turner's spectacular 'Seascape: Folkestone", for a record £7.3 million (£21.8 million in 2017) from the sale of the collection of noted British art historian Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark. The following year, Thomson, 27, broke another world record when he bought Rembrandt's monumental "Christ Presented to the People", from 1655, for a record £561,000 (£1.7 million in 2017) at Christie's London, when the Duke of Devonshire sold the Chatsworth Collection in one of the largest auctions of the time. Thomson sold both masterpieces within a few years during the 1980s financial crisis.

In an interview with Geraldine Norman in The Independent in 1994, Thomson said he bought his first Constable drawing at 19, giving the seller "an oil painting in exchange and quite a lot of money".

Norman described him as a "fanatical collector", and Thomson described how he "fell in love" with Constable's style as a young child.

In his twenties, Thomson stunned the art world with two monumental purchases.

In 2002, Thomson and his father paid a world record price of $76.7 million to acquire Rubens' "Massacre of the Innocents", now the centrepiece of the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Upon the death of his father in 2006, Thomson became the chairman of Thomson Corporation and also inherited his father's British title, Baron Thomson of Fleet.

According to a plan devised decades ago by Thomson Corporation founder Roy Thomson, when Kenneth Thomson died (in June 2006), control of the family fortune passed on to David:

In 2007, Thomson paid $1.8 million for a face mask, the highest price ever paid for a single piece of Native North American art.

After the acquisition of Reuters in 2008, Thomson became the chairman of the merged entity, Thomson Reuters.

In 2010, Osmington sold its stake in eight retail properties to the Canada Pension Plan for $336 million.

Osmington is a major investor in FarmersEdge, a precision agriculture company.

Osmington is also a partner in True North Sports and Entertainment, owners of the National Hockey League's Winnipeg Jets and the Canada Life Centre in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Osmington is redeveloping the retail space of Toronto's Union Station.

In 2023, Osmington revealed that it was bringing the fast food chain Shake Shack to Canada with plans for 35 outlets.

Thomson's investment activities are managed through Toronto hedge fund Morgan Bay Capital.

In 2012, Thomson shattered records buying a painting by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, "Ida Reading a Letter", paying the highest price ever for a Danish artist.

In 2012, Thomson broke the record for the most expensive 18th-century British watercolour when he paid £2.4 million for a small landscape by John Robert Cozens.

Thomson has donated upwards of $276 million to the Art Gallery of Ontario's renovation costs, in addition to creating a permanent endowment with an additional $20 million donation.

Thomson is an active acquirer of Canadian art.

And in November 2016 he paid a record C$11.2 million to buy a painting at auction by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris entitled "Mountain Forms".

Thomson operates his collecting activities through his personal Thomson Works of Art.

Thomson also funds the Archive of Modern Conflict, based in London.

Specialists within the archive purchase photography collections worldwide and also run a book-publishing arm, AMC Books, which has a Canadian imprint, Bone Idle Books, based in Toronto.

Following Thomson Reuters' sale of a controlling stake in its financial business in 2018, Thomson expressed frustrations working in the family business.

He is currently engaged in discussions with family members to leave the family business, Thomson Reuters, to focus on his own art and real estate activities.

Thomson is a noted art collector and owns works by Rembrandt, J. M. W. Turner, Paul Klee, Hammershoi, Edvard Munch, Patrick Heron, Joseph Beuys, E. L. Kirchner, and Egon Schiele.

Thomson owns the world's largest collection of paintings and drawings by the English painter John Constable.