His Cousin Was The Founder Of Philips Electronics

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, then a town in the Kingdom of Prussia and today a city in Germany, at Brucken Gasse 664. He was the third of Heinrich Marx and Henrietta Pressburg's nine children. When his brother Moritz passed away in 1819, he was left as the oldest child. Heinrich Marx was a prominent jurist of the age of enlightenment who was drawn to the works of Voltaire and Immanuel Kant. He participated in the movement in Prussia for reforms and a constitution. Marx's parents were both Jewish and came from a long line of rabbis. But before Karl was born, Heinrich changed his religion from Judaism to Lutheranism, perhaps to get away from the restrictions of anti-Semitic laws. When Karl was six years old, he underwent baptism.

Henrietta Pressburg, his mother, was from a wealthy business family that went on to build Philips Electronics, one of the biggest electronics firms in the world today. The Philips Company was founded in 1891 as a family business by Frederick Philips, the banker-son of his uncle. In 1912, Gerard and his younger brother Anton converted the company into Royal Philips Electronics NV, which expanded to become the massive multinational it is today. Lion eventually lost patience with Marx and stopped letting him borrow money from him.