PERSONAL PROFILES OF THE RICHEST MEN IN TOWN
Founder and CEO of Oak Associates, Ltd., an investment management and mutual funds company with more than $30 billion under management. Despite the effects of multiple sclerosis, Oelschlager has become one of the nation’s most respected investors. He began his career working for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company managing a pension fund before deciding the only way to make his fortune was to strike out on his own. Firestone became his first client. His wife, Vanita, wrote a book called Jimisms. My favorite: “I would like to say to those people with multiple sclerosis: Don’t let MS be an excuse.” Not surprisingly, he says, “There is no one I would want to change places with. I want to be me.” Oelschlager holds a BA in economics from Denison University and a JD from Northwestern University School of Law.
The brother–brother team that founded the video gaming company Vicarious Visions, the creator of video and computer games like Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam, Spider-man 3, Shrek the Third, and Nintendo’s Guitar Hero III. The CEO and president, respectively, started the company in their parents’ basement in the early 1990s while they were still in high school. In 2005, they sold Vicarious Visions to the Activision Blizzard, an $8 billion interactive gaming company that is now the largest in the world. The brothers still run the Vicarious Visions division. Karthik has degrees in computer science and psychology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Guha has an honors degree in chemistry from Harvard University.
The founder of the Yankee Candle Company, Kittredge started in his mom’s kitchen in South Hadley, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen in an attempt to make her an inexpensive Christmas gift. The rock band that he had hoped would create his fortune had broken up, and he was flat broke. That one candle, made from melted crayons in an old milk container, had within two decades become a $100 million company and the leading scented candle maker in the world. In 1998, when he was forty-five, Kittredge sold 90 percent of his firm to private equity company Fortsman Little and reaped a half-billion-dollar fortune. Today Yankee Candle is a billion-dollar business, and the former candle maker makes his lifestyle fragrant at his homes in Amherst, Nantucket, Florida, and aboard his 200-foot Feadship yacht.
President and CEO of McKinley Asset Management, an investment company he founded in 1990. “The Peter Lynch of the Northwest,” Gillam grew up in the back-room warehouse of his father’s liquor store after his parents’ divorce. He made his way to Wharton and UCLA, ultimately becoming not only the richest man in Anchorage but also the richest man in Alaska. He has proven that you can successfully manage money anywhere in the United States and make millions with just a little technology, a lot of smarts—and a hangar full of jets. A true Alaskan adventurer, Gillam says, “Alaska is the Switzerland of America.” He loves the wilds of America’s forty-ninth state, where he fishes, hunts, skis, hikes, and pilots his own floatplane over three million lakes.
Chairman of Sierra Pacific Industries, a wood products manufacturing company that is the third largest producer of timber in the country. Emmerson is also either the largest or the second largest landowner in the United States, owning well over a million acres, competing with Ted Turner. “I think Ted has a couple more acres,” he admits. He believes you can never own too much land or learn too much from other successful people. He says, “I love to read biographies of successful people—people that I respect. I have never subscribed to the Wall Street Journal.”
With his partner, Arthur Blank, Marcus founded the Home Depot in 1979 after being fired from Handy Dan—a home improvement retailer that Home Depot ultimately put out of business. Revenge is sweet, but that’s not how Marcus sees it today. He says, “Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me.” The Home Depot is the largest and most successful home improvement company in the world. In just twenty-eight years, the company grew from three stores to more than two thousand, and from two hundred employees to more than three hundred thousand of what the Home Depot calls associates, thanks to Marcus. Marcus’s billions have allowed him to become Atlanta’s most prominent philanthropist. He is the man and the money ($200 million) behind the Georgia Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the world, which opened in 2005.
Founder and CEO of Dell, Inc., Michael laid the groundwork for his eponymous company in 1984 in his dorm room at the University of Texas. He dropped out of college to pursue his dream of building the world’s most successful computer company, by eliminating the middleman. The word direct is today firmly associated with only one computer company. A mere fourteen years after his dorm room dream, Dell, Inc. had become the second largest manufacturer of computers in the world. Today Michael Dell is worth $17 billion and is back in the CEO’s seat after a stint as the company’s chairman. It seems no one can run the company as successfully as the man with the original vision—and the one who has the most at stake.
The elusive billionaire owner and CEO of the Baltimore Ravens, Bisciotti (pronounced bih-SHAH-tee) is the second youngest owner of an NFL team. He also co-founded Aerotek (now Allegis Group), a temporary employment company providing employees to the aerospace and technology sectors. Allegis is the third largest staffing firm in the United States and sixth largest in the world, creating the majority of his billion-dollar fortune.
The king of horror novels often referred to as America’s best loved bogeyman is one of the richest writers in American history. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970 with a BA in English and few prospects of finding a teaching job. He became a laborer at an industrial laundry, but supplemented his meager income with the occasional sale of a short story. King’s breakthrough novel, Carrie, catapulted him to literary stardom. Carrie sold millions of copies and led to seventy-five more King books at last count, making him one of the most prolific authors in America. His books have spawned dozens of Hollywood hit movies.
Biotech billionaire, air force brat, University of Virginia Law graduate, Kirk is the fast-moving, faster-talking founder of GIV (General Injectibles and Vaccines). He also founded New River Pharmaceuticals, which pioneered the development of the breakthrough ADHD drug Vyvanse. In 2005, Kirk sold New River Pharmaceuticals to Shire, the maker of Adderall, for $2.6 billion. He is currently senior managing director and chief executive officer of Third Security, LLC, a life sciences venture capital and private equity company that he founded in 1999. Kirk also serves as chairman of the board of Clinical Data, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLDA), and serves on the board of directors of Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: HALO).
The Southern construction czar who owns one of the largest privately held companies in the United States. Gorrie purchased the small construction company in 1964 with the proceeds from his early investment in IBM stock (which he’d bought in the 1950s with the money he earned from his paper route) and from summer construction jobs. He says, “By 1960, I had over $100,000 in IBM stock because the growth stock had been growing by 20 to 25 percent per year.” The Auburn University engineering graduate spent three years in the US Navy’s Civil Engineering Corps after college before purchasing the small Thomas C. Brasfield construction company, which he later renamed Brasfield and Gorrie, even though the previous owner had no affiliation with his company. Gorrie’s company has poured the concrete for the Georgia Dome and Georgia Aquarium, and has more than $2 billion of annual construction revenue.
Co-founder (with John Abele) of Boston Scientific, a medical products company that changed the way surgery is done around the world. The Duke University and Wharton graduate is nonexecutive chairman of the firm, which is the leading maker of catheters, stents, and medical devices that allow for less invasive surgery. Under his leadership, Boston Scientific’s value has grown to better than $20 billion. He says, “There’s a big difference between long-term sustainable success and fast bubble success.” His has been the former.
Chairman of Renaissance Learning, Inc. (NASDAQ: RLRN), the reading and math motivation and progress software company whose Accelerated Reader program is now used in sixty-seven thousand schools. Paul first created a quiz-based program to help her own kids learn to love to read and to find success in reading; it’s now the nation’s leading reading management and progress program. She ran her nascent company in her basement so she could do laundry and take care of four children simultaneously. At her husband, Terry’s suggestion, she encouraged a local Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, school to test her accelerated reading program. It met with great success. Renaissance Learning has a market capitalization of more than half a billion dollars.
Chairman and CEO of M&T Bank Corporation. In 1982, Buffalo’s half-billion-dollar man purchased First Empire State Corporation, which became M&T Bank. Educated at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, Wilmers is also involved in the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center; he’s a member of the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government Visiting Committee as well as the Council on Foreign Relations. He and his French-born wife rub shoulders with the fashionable elite at their vineyard Château Haut Bailly in France.
Founder and chairman of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (NASDAQ: GMCR), which has financially outperformed Howard Schultz’s Starbucks over the past decade. Stiller began his entrepreneurial career as co-founder of “cigarette” rolling paper company EZ Wider, which he sold in 1980—reaping a $3 million payday. He then parlayed his win and windfall into becoming the coffee king of the Green Mountains of Vermont. He is not only the most successful man in Vermont, but also possibly the busiest: He owns Heritage Flight, an air charter company; is working on artificial intelligence technology to teach meditation telephonically; and is cleaning up cow manure and processing it in ways that benefit the environment.
The most successful man in my hometown. The former Lockheed Aircraft and Southern Railway software programmer fell in love with computers when he took his first computer course at Georgia Tech. He says, “From the first time I laid my eyes on a computer, I saw it as a device to solve problems—and I love to solve problems.” He left the business world to teach business at Georgia State, but it was a new job at West Georgia College (now the University of West Georgia) that brought him to Carrollton. The happy professor reluctantly rejoined the business world when it became apparent that no one else in town knew how to program computers. As a favor to the head of the local Department of Family and Children’s Services office, he spent a weekend writing a computer program automating the distribution of food stamps—a process that had previously been done by hand. Stone’s innovative software so simplified an otherwise unruly system that news quickly spread. His success allowed him to scale his business to all 159 counties in Georgia. At $1 per transaction, he soon built a $26 million business, scaling his business to twenty states. Today SMI is a thriving $40 million company run by his kids. In addition to his family-owned Systems and Methods Incorporated, Stone has built a real estate development company with his daughter and grandson. They are currently designing, building, and selling residential properties on Lake Wedowee, just across the border in Alabama.
The auto-racing billionaire who owns Speedway Motor-sports, Inc., which includes the Charlotte Motor Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and Texas Motor Speedway. He is also chairman and CEO of Sonic Automotive, a company with more than 180 automobile dealerships. Smith is the hyperaggressive salesman who brought NASCAR to Wall Street: Speedway was the first motor-sports company to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Cars are in his blood. The son of a cotton farmer, Smith dreamed of being a race-car driver as far back as he can recall and bought his first race car at seventeen. He then built his beloved Charlotte Motor Speedway, lost it to bankruptcy, and got it back. From broke to billionaire, Smith’s journey has been one of high drama. He loves to sell and he loves to make a splash—he once had Elvis impersonators parachute down to his Charlotte racetrack for a pre-race show.
The $6 billion man and Chicago native who owns Equity Group Investments LLC was once the reigning king of real estate investment trusts and often referred to as the country’s largest landlord. Today Zell spends most of his time as a press lord, having acquired the Tribune Company of Chicago, but in true RMIT fashion, he is currently fighting a big battle. The Tribune Company owns some of the most prestigious newspaper and media properties in the country—the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun, not to mention the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field. He recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to give him some time to reorganize the company into a leaner and profitable enterprise. He often refers to himself as a “grave dancer,” and my bet is he’ll once again rise to the challenge. He sold Equity Office Properties to the Blackstone Group for $39 billion after all, which was the largest leveraged buyout in American history at the time. The University of Michigan and University of Michigan Law School graduate says, “I’m a professional opportunist.”
Chairman and CEO of Invacare, the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of home health care products such as wheelchairs, walkers, and home oxygen systems. Mixon led a management buyout of his company from Johnson and Johnson in 1979, when Invacare had just $19.5 million in sales. Under Mixon’s care, it has grown to $1.5 billion in net sales. “Money isn’t important,” he says, “until you want to buy something.” He has recently bought his hometown the Cleveland Institute of Music, a new 250-seat recital hall that bears his name. The longtime Republican is also chairman of the board of trustees of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and has established a chair in entrepreneurial studies at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.
The CEO and founder of Checks Into Cash, Jones is not just the richest but also by far the most colorful character in his hometown (population thirty-eight thousand) just outside Chattanooga. He founded his subprime loan company in 1993, and today it is the third largest payday lending company in America, boasting $1 billion a year in revenue. Before he attained his payday loan prominence, Jones ran Credit Bureau Services of Cleveland, the largest credit collection agency in Tennessee. He describes himself as “the only person in town with the guts to drive a Bentley and a Maybach.” Jones is a hyperdevoted historic preservationist in his hometown, providing the funding for a serious face-lift of downtown Cleveland. He has also preserved the local burger and milk-shake joint—known as “The Spot”—which was established in 1937, and the upscale Bald Headed Bistro that he says is named for himself. “I have always wanted a limestone mansion just like the Beverly Hillbillies,” he says. He’s got it, except he had to settle for Texas limestone instead of Indiana limestone like the Clampetts’ mansion. For his twenty-fifth-anniversary Halloween party, he brought the stars of the 1960s sitcom Leave It to Beaver—Jerry Mathers, Tony Dow, and Ken Osmond—to celebrate with him and 25,000 of his friends. When hiring, he says, “I look for people who have their antennae high in the air.”
This spirited Bible scholar has created the largest and most successful real estate development and management company in Colorado Springs. The air force NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) veteran has vast real estate operations in the Western states. He is quiet about his money, but vociferous about his faith and his desire to change the world. Landhuis says, “People are drawn to courage.” He has had the courage to find the ideal intersection of strong faith in God and capitalism. Today his companies—The Landhuis Company of Colorado and Paradigm Realty Advisors of Tulsa, Oklahoma—manage and account for hundreds of thousands of square feet of office and commercial space as well as thousands of acres of developable land. Landhuis wants his Pikes Peak development to give first-time buyers access to the American Dream. While real estate has given him his great wealth, he says that God has given him the real meaning in life.
The former CEO of Southland Log Homes, Taylor is today the secretary of commerce for the state of South Carolina and also a part-time venture capitalist. His principal responsibility is to attract to his home state information- and technology-based businesses that will increase income levels and enhance South Carolinians’ quality of life. Taylor became president and chief executive officer of Southland Log Homes before he was twenty-five years old, and built the company into the largest producer of pre-cut log homes in the world. In 2004, Taylor sold Southland to a private equity company, Arcapita Inc., but he continues to serve on the board of directors. His passionate mission today is to encourage more local companies to build their businesses and remain happily ever after in the Palmetto State.
The founder of the Limited Inc.—the company behind Victoria’s Secret—is in touch with his feminine side. His net worth of at least $3 billion is not Victoria’s secret, or anyone else’s for that matter. He also owns Bath & Body Works and New York’s Fifth Avenue retailer Henri Bendel. The highly secretive CEO doesn’t allow calls to his office from the company’s main line. His penchant for the finer things in life, however, is not so secret. He lives in a $50 million Georgian mansion in New Albany, Ohio, has luxury homes in Palm Beach and Aspen, and owns one of the world’s largest yachts—appropriately named the Limitless.
Worth a reported $7 billion, this press-shy, highly controversial corporate raider is chairman of Valhi, his holding company, valued at more than $3 billion. The banker-turned-pharmacy-owner-turned-pharmacy-chain-owner (before he sold to Eckerd) has been at the center of bankruptcies, bad deals, bad bonds, and bad blood in his family, but the investor and conglomerate builder always seems to come out smelling like the yellow rose of his Texas. This poor boy from Golden, Texas, who grew up in a house with no running water, signed a 1989 letter to Fortune, “Harold C. Simmons, M.A. Economics, Phi Beta Kappa, Billionaire.” He told the magazine, “I only know how to do one thing well and that’s read a financial statement.” I met him at the home of Nancy Hamon, the richest woman in Dallas, but I could not wangle a personal interview, even after numerous letters and more than thirty phone calls. Simmons proves that when you’re the richest man in town, you can make the rules, and he does.
The submarine sandwich sultan founded his company with a $1,000 loan from family friend Dr. Peter Buck. Privately held Subway today has approximately twenty-nine thousand stores and has made both DeLuca and Buck billionaires. As the leader of the largest fast-food franchise company in the world, DeLuca is known as a masterful marketing expert. Witness the “Jared” commercial that made his sub shop franchises a place to turn for fast-food weight loss. He says, “I’m not a natural persuader. I’m no Barack Obama.” Yet he has persuaded twenty-nine thousand entrepreneurs to join his Subway team as franchisees.
The former owner and CEO of Iams, the premium pet foods company he sold to Procter and Gamble for $2.3 billion in 1999. Mathile (pronounced ma-TEEL) is passionate about education and has founded the Center for Entrepreneurial Education just outside his hometown. He realized early on in the development of Iams that the most important thing he could do was hire dog and cat lovers. Those animal people helped him build a company from near scratch into a multibillion-dollar success. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be an entrepreneur and own his own business. He says, “I have always liked my own version of Goethe’s declaration, ‘Dream no little dreams, for they have no magic to move men’s souls.’ ” This inspired him to title his book about his life and business experiences Dream No Little Dreams. He has dreamed only big dreams.
Founder of Hawaiian Tropic. The suntan lotion salesman and master marketer created his first lotion concoction in garbage cans and sold his product directly from his lifeguard station on the beaches of Florida. Rice pioneered the Miss Hawaiian Tropic beauty contest as a way to build the Hawaiian Tropic brand. He sold his company in August 2007 to Playtex for a reported $83 million. He started out his career as a teacher and a coach. While he loved both, they didn’t love him back. “I taught for eight years at seven schools and was fired six times,” he says. “My failures taught me my greatest lessons—the most important thing I learned in life was that when I fell down, I could get back up.”
Co-founder, chairman, and CEO of EchoStar Communications, Inc., and the DISH Network (NASDAQ GS: DISH), the satellite TV folks. Worth more than $10 billion, Ergen is an ace poker player who bet the farm in 1995 when he launched the first direct-broadcast satellite into orbit on a Chinese rocket. The gamble paid off: In 1980, Ergen and gambling buddy Jim DeFranco, along with Ergen’s future wife, scraped together $60,000 and started his satellite dish company. The Ergens and DeFranco purchased a couple of satellite dishes after running the tables in Las Vegas—only to lose them en route to Colorado, when gale-force winds blew them and their dishes off the road. They were able to salvage only one. Still, that dish served them well as their demonstration sample in what was to become a sales frenzy in the mountains of Colorado, where TV signals are weak because of the terrain. Today, EchoStar (DISH) has a market capitalization in excess of $16 billion. Ergen owns more than half of its shares.
Iowa’s chemical king, dubbed the Prince of Pesticides by Forbes magazine, is the 100 percent owner of his company Albaugh Inc. Living part of the year in Marco Island, Florida, Albaugh has come a long way from his Ankeny, Iowa, farm roots. The billionaire boy wonder started as a fertilizer salesman and then mortgaged his home to buy a truck to haul weed-killing chemicals to a potential customer in South Dakota. Today Albaugh’s multibillion-dollar company, although still based in Ankeny, Iowa, has operations as far afield as Brazil and Argentina. He also has all the amenities (his own private golf course, boats, and planes) of the billionaire that he is. Like many RMITs, he is making his hometown of Ankeny a priority by developing real estate there. His current project, Prairie Hill, is a green community that is to be Iowa’s largest new urban development.
The Motor City glass magnate is chairman of Guardian Industries and enjoys a net worth of $4 billion. His company is the world’s largest manufacturer of automotive glass. He satisfies his powerful passion for sports by owning the Detroit Pistons of the NBA, the Detroit Shock of the WNBA, and the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL. In 2004, he made sports history by becoming the first owner to win championships in three different professional leagues. Davidson began his career as a lawyer but left the legal profession to breathe new life into Guardian, which at the time had been owned by a relative who had gone bankrupt. Davidson picked up the shattered pieces.
The regent of real estate investment trusts, Sanders made his first fortune at LaSalle Partners in Chicago, a company he founded in 1968, which became the second largest property manager in the United States. Then he worked his moneymaking magic again with a real estate venture capital company, Security Capital, which he founded in the early 1990s—a time when real estate was in the tank. He took Security public in 1997 and reaped a second fortune. Now the Cornell graduate is changing the landscape of his hometown, El Paso, with his latest venture, Verde Realty. Sanders’s business role model was Tom Watson of IBM. In his career, he has hired more than a hundred IBM professionals because of the buttondown, people-first culture and strategic training IBMers enjoyed. This people-first philosophy has led Jeff Allen—a former employee of Security Capital who now owns his own firm, J. B. Allen Realty in San Juan Capistrano, California—to say, “Bill put together a team of the most highly talented people in the real estate industry ever under one roof.” He’s still doing it today, just back home in El Paso instead of Chicago.
The former North Dakota farm boy is now a hotel king who operates more than 350 hotel properties bearing the names Residence Inn by Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn by Hilton, Holiday Inn Express, and Comfort Inn. Tharaldson owns and runs the largest independent hotel property management company in the United States, and is currently developing properties in Las Vegas. In March 2006, the Tharaldson family sold 130 hotels to the Whitehall Real Estate Fund (a division of Goldman Sachs) for a reported $1.2 billion in cash. He says, “I have always outworked everybody else.” With his billion in the bank today, he doesn’t have to anymore, but he does anyway—as with so many RMITs, it’s who he is. It’s what he loves.
The co-founder and CEO of Syntel (NASDAQ: SYNT), a multibillion-dollar information technology company headquartered in Troy, Michigan. Along with his wife, Neerja Sethi, Desai started Syntel while both were in graduate school at the University of Michigan. The Kenyan-born, Indian-educated Desai was one of the early technology outsourcing leaders. The Desais live in ultra-exclusive Fisher Island, Florida, when they are not in India at Syntel’s offices in Mumbai or building the new eighteen-hundred-acre Syntel campus in Pune, India. “Globalization is an irreversible mega-trend,” Desai says, “and America should actively promote globalization.” Syntel competes with IBM, EDS, and Accenture, but he says, “Companies prefer to work with us because we are a nimble, hungry, and responsible company.”
America’s most serious serial entrepreneur, the former trash hauler has hauled in a $3 billion fortune by building three Fortune 1000 companies: Waste Management, Blockbuster, and AutoNation. He has been a partner behind Extended Stay America and has the distinction of being the only man to own three major-league sports franchises at one time: the Miami Dolphins, Florida Marlins, and Florida Panthers.
The private equity potentate of Texas Pacific Group (TPG), which has made major investments in J. Crew, Neiman Marcus, Burger King, Bally’s, Ducati, Continental Airlines, and TXU. The Harvard Law graduate, who was once a major deal strategist for Texas billionaire Robert Bass, has more than $30 billion of assets under management at TPG, which he founded in 1992. “Bondo,” as he is often called, learned at the knee of famed investor Richard Rainwater while he was managing the big Bass money. Rainwater still calls Fort Worth home and is most likely slightly richer than Bonderman, but he spends much of his time with wife Darla Moore in their Lake City, South Carolina, home. Like most private equity privateers, Bonderman was reluctant to be interviewed. He finally relented, but not easily. He said in an e-mail, “I’m prepared to listen, not sure I’m prepared to talk.” He did talk, but said little. His success, though, speaks for itself.
Patriot prince of Pelco, the security and surveillance systems company that McDonald bought in the early 1980s, built into an international company, and sold for $1.7 billion in 2007, to French conglomerate Schneider Electric. He remains chairman of the board. If you have ever felt as though you’re being watched, you were most likely being sized up by Pelco’s security systems, which currently protect the queen of England at Buckingham Palace, the Statue of Liberty, and the Presidential Palace in China. The California company honored New York’s police officers and firefighters by bringing many of them to its Clovis headquarters on September 11, 2002, one year after the tragedy, to thank them personally. To signal its patriotism and honor all those who died on that sad day, the company constructed a 9/11 memorial at its headquarters as well.
The multilevel selling magnate who founded Amway with high school best friend Jay Van Andel has built a multibillion-dollar privately held company and a multibillion-dollar fortune. The ultimate optimist has written three books, Believe!, Compassionate Capitalism, and Hope From My Heart: Ten Lessons for Life. The devoted family man and ardent Republican owns the NBA’s Orlando Magic.
The former Clemson University linebacker and communications entrepreneur has built more than thirty companies since graduating in 1976. Cubbage made his first fortune when he sold Corporate Telemanagement Group. He has served as chairman of New South Communications, chief executive officer of telecommunications firm iOnosphere Inc., and chairman of Rhino Automotive; he is a principal investor in the Greenville Rhinos Arena Football League team.
The founder and CEO of Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ: IBKR) grew up in communist Hungary and came to the United States originally to work as an engineering draftsman… until he had the opportunity to program a computer. Though he spoke no English, he spoke the language of software. Peterffy says his background in computer programming is what most influences his approach to business today. He founded Interactive Brokers in 1977, and is today almost twice as rich ($11 billion) as his neighbor, the much more publicized Greenwich hedge fund honcho Steve Cohen (worth an estimated $6 billion). Cohen, as the CEO of SAC Capital Advisors, has a penchant for making big money, building big houses, and buying big art. Peterffy prefers to be much quieter. His Interactive Brokers, including his market-making unit Timber Hill, executes more than two million equity-based option contracts worldwide every day. It’s anything but quiet.
A triathlon-running, house-renovating, tech-savvy master networker and real estate developer, Hartzler founded the Harrisburg Young Professionals (HYP). He made his first fortune on the sale of Webclients, a company that ran Web sites focused on generating leads for advertisers, which he and partners Josh Gray and Scott Piotroski sold to ValueClick in 2005 for $141 million. He is currently president of WCI Partners, a real estate development company that he founded in 2005 to make downtown Harrisburg more historically beautiful and his bank account more bountiful. His favorite quote about business and success is Thomas Edison’s “Vision without execution is hallucination,” which he attributes to his former partner Josh Gray.
The chairman and CEO of Aetna, the health care benefits company, is a Roosevelt University and MIT graduate. Williams got his big start in the health insurance business at Blue Cross of California. He also sits on the board of his friend Ken Chenault’s American Express Corporation. Williams joined Aetna in 2001, when the company was in deep financial crisis. He effected a major turnaround employing a balance of informational technology and leadership skills. His big claim to fame was instituting the Executive Management Information System (EMIS)—a data system that gathered information from across all the business units, yielding a whole new approach to performance measures. He is considered a charismatic leader with superior people skills. He has said, “When you ask people to do what is considered undoable, you have to work with them, coach them, and remove barriers, but it all starts with the belief that people want to do the right things.”
The founder and CEO of IDG, the largest technology publishing, research, and event management company in the world. While still a student at MIT, McGovern began his career in publishing by working for the first US computer magazine, Computers and Automation. In this first job, he learned his biggest business lesson from Tom Watson: Listen to your customer’s needs and meet them. He founded IDG as a research company to provide information to the computer industry with only $5,000 he received from the sale of his car. He was able to persuade the major computer companies, including IBM, to pay 50 percent up front for the research he would eventually deliver.
The company has grown to more than $3 billion in revenue derived from publishing more than three hundred magazines, including its flagship, Computerworld. IDG produces more than 750 events and expos in fifty-five countries, including the international series of LinuxWorld Conference & Expo and Macworld Conference & Expo. McGovern is also a trustee of his alma mater, MIT, where he has funded the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, which is studying the neurogenesis of the brain.
The serial entrepreneur, founder, and owner of The Shidler Group, the largest real estate development company in Hawaii, which owns more than 10 percent of Honolulu’s office space. He purchased his first building, the Polynesian Plaza in Hawaii, in 1972, followed by acquisitions in Santa Barbara and Seattle. By the late 1980s, The Shidler Group had twelve offices on the mainland, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. Today Shidler’s company owns more than two thousand properties across the country and in Canada and over 1.5 million square feet of office space. He has also founded four companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange: TriNet Corporate Realty Trust, Inc. (now called iStar Financial, Inc.; NYSE: SFI), First Industrial Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: FR), Corporate Office Properties Trust (NYSE: OFC), and Primus Guaranty, Ltd. (NYSE: PRS). Hawaii’s main man recently gave the University of Hawaii its largest gift ever to create the Shidler School of Business.
The co-founder and chairman of Enterprise Products Partners. EPCO is a New York Stock Exchange company with a market capitalization of over $13 billion, giving Duncan a conservative net worth of more than $8 billion. The onetime postal worker and big-game hunter says, “True wealth is really measured in the lives you touch, not the dollars you have.”
The co-founder and former chairman of Resort Condominiums International, the largest vacation exchange company in the world. (Many folks right outside Indianapolis think that Mel Simon, the Brooklyn-born multibillionaire and shopping center shogun, is Indianapolis’s RMIT. Simon, however—who also owns pro basketball’s Indiana Pacers—lives today in Palm Beach.) Christel DeHaan is often referred to in travel circles as the time-share queen. The former governess who first ran a typing service in her home in Indianapolis ultimately built RCI into a company that she was able to sell to Henry Silverman’s Cendant Corporation for $825 million in 1996. She has since devoted her life to helping children in developing countries through her Christel House International program.
The Christel House mission is to break the cycle of poverty by educating young people in Mexico, Venezuela, India, and South Africa, helping them to become self-sufficient. In the spirit of the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” DeHaan says, “We teach young people how to fish—how to navigate their world in a way that breaks the cycle of poverty. We teach them practical life skills, and we teach them character.” Her twenty-six hundred children receive the help and guidance they need to achieve productive, self-sufficient lives. DeHaan is using the same business principles with Christel House International that she used so successfully in the for-profit world with Resort Condominiums International: She believes in metrics, accountability, and transparency.
Co-founder and CEO of Garmin Corporation, the world’s largest producer of global positioning systems. The GPS guru is a native of Taiwan who came to the United States to pursue his education at the University of Tennessee. He became a systems analyst for Teledyne and worked with the US Army before using his software development expertise to found Garmin in 1989. Today it’s a $4.5 billion international company, giving Min Kao a personal fortune valued at more than $3 billion.
The founder of mutual fund company American Century Funds, with more than $100 billion under management. In 1958, medical school dropout and former World War II fighter pilot Stowers invested $2,500 of his own money to launch the Twentieth Century Fund, a no-load mutual fund that is still a core component of the mutual fund giant today. He’d learned the investment game as a mutual fund salesman for Waddell and Reed. His fortune-creating epiphany came when he realized that a computer program could change the ways stocks are selected. A cancer survivor, he and his wife founded a multibillion-dollar biomedical research facility called the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
The owner of privately held Pilot Travel Centers, LLC, and Pilot Corporation. Often called Trucker’s Paradise, Pilot is the nation’s largest operator of travel centers and largest seller of over-the-road diesel fuel. It all started with just one gas station that Haslam bought shortly after his service in the army at age twenty-seven. The reserved and humble Haslam says he has used the lessons he learned playing football at the University of Tennessee as his tenets for business success. “First you have to get the best players and put them in the right positions, then you have practice, and then you have to execute on Saturdays. The same is true in business, except you have to execute every day and you have to execute with integrity,” he says. “The number one value at Pilot is integrity, and that comes first.” Today he is executing on philanthropy while still running Pilot. He has made the largest gift ever—$32.5 million—to his alma mater. He says, “You learn, you earn, and then you must give.”
The high-flying, deep-sea-diving driving force behind Global Industries, a $2 billion marine construction company. At age thirty, he purchased Global Divers and worked hard to become the deep-sea construction leader. He orchestrated more than a dozen major acquisitions with companies much larger than his, including Sea-Con Services, Inc. (a division of Chicago Bridge and Iron Company), in 1987; Santa Fe Offshore Construction Company in 1990; Teledyne Movible Offshore in 1992; the Red Adair Company in 1993; and selected assets and operational bases of SubSea International (a Halliburton company subsidiary) in 1997. Global Industries went public in 1993, applying a well-earned half-billion dollars to Doré’s personal balance sheet. He says, “I’m proud of my scorecard.” Seven hundred million is indeed something of which to be proud.
Las Vegas’s biggest gambler grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston as the son of an immigrant taxi driver. He loves to say, “If you don’t have a conviction about what you are doing, you are never going to make it.” Today the undisputed king of Las Vegas is making it in both Las Vegas and China’s new gambling mecca, Macau. Regarding his competitors in China, he recently told USA Today, “We will cannibalize them.” He still has the means to do so even though his Sands Corporation took a major stock hit during the recent economic crisis. Adelson once had a $28 billion fortune, making him the third richest American, behind Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Don’t cry for Adelson.
The founder of TCBY (This Can’t Be Yogurt, later changed to The Country’s Best Yogurt) was taking a break from shopping with his wife at Neiman Marcus in Dallas when he tasted what he thought was the best dessert he had ever had. Then in his forties and technically retired after selling a series of companies—most recently Old Tyme Foods—he saw his next wealth-creation mechanism in healthy yogurt. The former high school principal built the company from the ground up and took TCBY public in 1984, reaping a small fortune. In 2000, he sold the company to Capricorn Management, which gave him his second bite of the yogurt. With the proceeds from the sale of TCBY, he then set up his own concern investing in luxury companies. Today he is the backer of high-end automobile dealerships such as Desert European Motorcars, which is the number one Rolls-Royce and Bentley dealership in the world. He also owns VIP Motor Cars Ltd. in Palm Springs, California, which houses Mercedes, BMW, Infiniti, and Maybach dealerships; and Newport European Motorcars Ltd. of Newport Beach, the place where he bought his first Rolls-Royce. Still riding high, he also owns Harley-Davidson dealerships in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
The founder and chairman of privately held Quicken Loans and the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. He told Forbes magazine, “Statistically it’s harder to become an owner of a pro sports team than it is to be a pro athlete.” The lifetime lover of sports has an If you can’t be one, own one philosophy. Gilbert starred in business by turning Quicken Loans into the largest Internet mortgage lender in the United States. Forbes once reported that at age twelve, he developed a pizza business in his mom’s kitchen and arm-twisted his younger brother into being his delivery boy. A local pizza joint that didn’t appreciate the competition alerted the health department, and Gilbert’s first company was shut down. Always a maverick, he entered the business world in earnest as a real estate agent while attending law school at Wayne State University. He placed a FOR SALE sign on the front lawn of his parents’ house—which was definitely not for sale—and used that as a way to gain new customers to whom he would show other houses. He said, “You learn something about mortgages doing that. Not to mention salesmanship.” Gilbert recently launched BizdomU, an entrepreneurial boot camp in Detroit designed to train and mentor young entrepreneurs. The goal is to help create jobs and wealth in inner cities.
At ninety, Kerkorian is still making business waves and waves of money with his activist investments. When Kerkorian’s holding company, Tracinda Corporation, calls, CEOs begin to quake in their boots. Just ask Ford, Chrysler, or General Motors, or witness his activism at TWA, back in the day.
This $16 billion man made his big fortune in Las Vegas, where he’s known as the father of the mega-resort. His most famous property was the MGM Grand Hotel, which he opened in 1973, today known as Bally’s. At the time, it was the largest hotel in the world. A high school dropout and former newspaper boy, professional boxer, and Royal Canadian Air Force pilot, he not surprisingly got his real start in the airline business. As a licensed pilot, Kerkorian invested in what he knew. He bought a small air charter business that he renamed Trans International Airlines, ultimately selling it to TWA in 1968 for an $85 million windfall. Two decades later, he would own TWA.
The co-founder and former chairman of Humana, the well-known managed health care business. Founded with friend Wendell Cherry in 1961 with a $5,000 loan from Household Finance, and a lot of sweat equity, the company began with one nursing home in Louisville. The former accountant and college professor expanded the company (then known as Extendicare) rapidly by building and acquiring more nursing homes. By 1969, he owned the largest nursing home company in the country.
Jones took the company public in 1968. By 1974, he had sold most of the nursing homes in order to acquire hospitals, and by the late 1970s, Humana had become the largest for-profit hospital system in the United States. It established a health insurance division in early 1984 and a decade later spun off the hospitals to its shareholders as an entity called Galen Health Care, Inc., which was sold to Nashville RMIT Tom Frist’s HCA. Humana became a health benefits company. This began the modern managed care movement. By the time Jones stepped down as chairman in 2005, Humana was a $20 billion company.
Creator of American Girl dolls, which she sold to Mattel for $700 million in 1998. Using a a portion of her doll company fortune, Rowland, like Kim Basinger, purchased a town—Aurora, New York, the home of her alma mater, Wells College. Aurora citizens have been atwitter over her strong my-way-or-the-highway approach to getting things done, but the aging town and college campus are gentrified today thanks to Rowland’s millions and dogged determination. She even bought local home furnishings company MacKenzie-Childs out of bankruptcy to save hundreds of jobs. That doesn’t mean the locals are happy, however. One resident says, “Pleasant isn’t,” proving the maxim that no good deed goes unpunished. Today Rowland is spending less time, and much less money, on the town and college she had hoped her fortune would save. Perhaps Aurora, New York’s loss will be Madison, Wisconsin’s pleasant gain.
The founder, chairman, and CEO of Federal Express wrote a business plan for an overnight delivery company while at Yale University, but his professor thought it was a silly idea. Today, Smith says, “We are the clipper ships of the computer age.” FedEx is a $16 billion company, giving Smith a net worth in excess of $2 billion. His philosophy is PSP: People, Service, Profit. The founding father of the overnight delivery business loves to say of his FedEx idea, “Well the US Postal Service didn’t think of it.”
The founder and CEO of Peavey Electronics, he got his start making guitar amplifiers after coming to the realization that he was not a gifted enough musician to be the next Chuck Berry or Keith Richards. He was, however, good at building things. He found the perfect marriage of his passion, rock music, and his natural talent for engineering and building electronic musical instruments and amplification. Today Peavey has more than two thousand items in its product line, including microphones, mixers, loudspeakers, guitars, power amps, and computer-controlled audio processors. He still loves strumming the guitar, but he much prefers making money from selling his products. Peavey has as many Mississippi maxims as he does millions. He believes the ten most common reasons for failure start with “failure to focus”—and then he lists failure to focus nine more times. He sums up his wealth-creation philosophy with, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
Known as the Condo Kaiser, Pérez is the driving force behind Miami’s Related Group of Florida. He runs the largest Hispanic-owned business in America and one of the largest real estate development companies in the world. Worth several billion dollars, Pérez is partners with fellow University of Michigan graduate Stephen M. Ross, who runs The Related Group New York. The oldest son of Cuban-exile parents, Pérez grew up in Argentina and Bogotá, Colombia, but longed for an American education and the American Dream—and he has achieved both. He says, “The American Dream is the freedom to do the things you want to do with the people you want to do it with—that’s success.”
The former chairman and CEO of Kohl’s Department Stores. Kellogg led a management buyout in 1986 and took the retailer public in 1992, which made him a billionaire. Kellogg built the small Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin–based regional retailer into a major national player, ultimately boasting a market capitalization of more than $13 billion. Currently, he is a venture capital investor with his billion-dollar Kohl’s nest egg. He is an investor and director in CarMax, the used-car retailer, among other companies.
The founder of Best Buy, the big-box consumer electronics retailer. Schulze started a modest stereo store called Sound of Music in 1966, which he renamed Best Buy in 1983. Today the reclusive Republican, worth an estimated $4 billion, is spending most of his time teaching at University of St. Thomas’s Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, which he has endowed. This is particularly impressive because Schulze never went to college.
Founder and owner of the Washington Companies, which has investments in multiple companies in heavy construction, mining, transportation, environmental remediation, aviation services, and real estate development. At age twenty-six, he became vice president of the largest construction company in Montana. Before he was thirty, with a loan from a local Caterpillar dealer, Washington began building a company that, by 1969, was the largest contractor in Montana and soon among the largest in the nation. He owns the largest private railroad in the United States, the largest marine transportation company in Canada, and the Butte Copper Mine. Washington enjoys sailing the high seas aboard his 226-foot yacht, Attessa. He can afford to—he’s worth $3.5 billion.
The co-founder, former CEO, and chairman of Mylan Labs, the generic pharmaceutical company that today dispenses more generic drugs than any other company in America. Puskar stepped down from the CEO spot just as the company reached the billion-dollar sales mark. Today Mylan has a market cap of $3.5 billion. Puskar has a net worth in excess of $700 million. He recently gave $20 million to the University of West Virginia, the largest donation in the school’s history.
Co-founder of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), along with his late father, Thomas Frist Sr., and family friend the late Jack Massey. The former military flight surgeon built HCA into the nation’s largest for-profit hospital management company by agglomerating hospitals across the country to take advantage of economies of scale. He’s famous for saying, ‘’Banks are together, filling stations are together, grocery stores are together—why can’t we put hospitals together? Economy of scale means so much.’’ In 1994, HCA merged with Columbia Healthcare, creating even more economies of scale and forming the world’s largest hospital company. HCA created a multibillion-dollar fortune for Frist and family.
Founder and chairman of the Irvine Company, a massive real estate development firm, Bren almost single-handedly made Orange County, California, into the pristine, über-wealthy retail and technology mecca it has become. He has been the major force behind the development of Newport Beach, the chic, rich town that has more Rolls-Royces per capita than anywhere outside the Middle East. The former marine is a serious snow skier and a significant donor to the Republican party. He’s worth $13 billion.
The Queens-born activist investor who usually gets his way when he makes a significant investment in a company. He considers himself an “unlocker of inherent value,” a capital allocator, and someone who makes things happen. He says, “There are very few companies in American where I couldn’t go in and knock 30 percent of cost out of them.” Often called a corporate raider—a term Icahn takes umbrage at—Icahn unapologetically insists he invests for one reason only: to make money. He has at least $16 billion to prove it, too. The effect of his investment in a company has come to be called the Icahn Lift, signifying the almost certain stock surge that takes place when he puts his money and influence to work. His mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, a struggling musician and singer, didn’t want to pay for his tuition at Princeton, so he worked as a cabana boy at several local beach clubs, sweeping the floors and ultimately sweeping up the cash for his tuition by hard work and even better poker playing. He is famous for saying to the board of Texaco in 1988, “A lot of people die fighting tyranny. The least I can do is vote against it.”
Founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, the arts, crafts, and home decoration superstore company. Green is the son of an Assemblies of God preacher and believes that putting God and family first are the keys to his success. He created a $4 billion fortune from a $600 bank loan. Starting as a stock boy, floor sweeper, and nut roaster for the local five-and-dime in Altus, Oklahoma, Green found his passion in retailing while still in high school. After working for McClellan’s 5&10, he became a manager of a local TG&Y, which he says was the Wal-Mart of that era. He saw the opportunity for specialization and started making picture frames on his kitchen table. Sales boomed; two years later, he opened his first Hobby Lobby. Green was never much of an athlete while growing up; he says, “Retail is my sport.” His mother and father would have preferred him to join the ministry, but he found his calling in the retail world. He gives God all the credit for his billion-dollar success and has forgone hundreds of millions in profits by not allowing his stores to open on Sundays. “It’s the day to be with family and to worship,” Green says.
We all know that Warren Buffett is Omaha’s most famous citizen, and we all know almost everything Buffett has ever uttered about investing and making money. But I was more interested in the wisdom of Omaha’s second richest man, Joe Ricketts, the founder and chairman of the board of TD Ameritrade, a discount brokerage that has blossomed thanks to Ricketts’s insight into the transformative power of the Internet. “The Internet made me a billionaire,” he says. The former commissioned salesperson for brokerage firm Dean Witter always wanted to own his own business, but didn’t have the money to make that dream a reality. Being a great salesperson was the next best thing, and was also a way to take control of his destiny. His training in sales eventually led to Ricketts’s dream coming true: Today TD Ameritrade enjoys an $11 billion market cap. “TD Ameritrade is humming on all cylinders right now,” Ricketts says, so he’s turning at least some of his attention to riding motorcycles and thinking about the next big thing.
This Cornell University graduate has become the most prominent hotel and resort magnate in central Florida. Rosen got his start in the hospitality industry at the famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and at various Hilton Hotels, but it was Disney Resorts that brought him to Orlando. Rosen had always dreamed of owning his own hotel. In 1974, that dream came true when he bought the Quality Inn on Orlando’s International Drive, which became the basis of an empire that now includes seven successful hotels in the Orlando area. His most recent resort and biggest development yet is Shingle Creek, a 230-acre, fifteen-hundred-room luxury resort and convention center positioned at the headwaters of the Florida Everglades.
Larry Page’s Stanford University buddy and the co-founder of Google is worth at least $19 billion. The Google story is perhaps the greatest business success story of the last two decades. Moscow-born Brin is the creator of the Google mission statement, “Do no evil.” The son of Russian Jewish parents, he proves the theory that math wizards rule the world. His father is a math professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center—and according to the best-selling book The Google Story, his mother still wants him to complete his graduate degree. Most recently, Brin has plopped down $5 million to reserve a seat on a future private space flight to the International Space Station with Space Adventures, the space tourism company.
The king of torts, Levin has been hailed as one of the most successful civil litigation attorneys in the country. He has received more than twenty-five jury verdicts in excess of $1 million (six in excess of $10 million). When not in court, he has even managed the careers of many champion boxers. In 1995, he was selected as National Boxing Manager of the Year while managing Roy Jones Jr. In 1998, he made the largest cash donation ever given to a public law school—his alma mater, the University of Florida School of Law, now called the Fredric G. Levin College of Law. When asked about his greatest accomplishment, however, Levin stated he is most proud of rewriting the Florida Medicaid Third Party Recovery Act, which permits the State of Florida to sue the tobacco industry to recover expenditures for treating illnesses caused by cigarette smoking. He wrote the legislation and was instrumental in its passage. The law has been described as “the single biggest blow against the tobacco industry in United States history.” The legislation eventually resulted in a $13 billion settlement for the State of Florida.
The founder of Infonautics, Half.com, Turn Tide, and First Round Capital—and he’s still in his thirties. Kopelman’s big windfall came in 2000, when he sold Half.com—the marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of used books, movies, and music—to eBay for $350 million. He has since founded First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture capital fund, making him an investor, director, and adviser to an assortment of technology businesses that he describes as Web 2.0 companies. He writes a tech blog called Red Eye VC. While he’s not physically in the Silicon Valley, he is truly at the heart of the new technology revolution.
The co-founder of Burt’s Bees, an environmentally friendly consumer products company, Quimby saw an opportunity to make candles from the beeswax by-product of boyfriend Burt Savitz’s small-town honey operation. This led to making the lip balm that is still Burt’s Bees’ best-selling product. In 1993, Roxanne bought out Burt, and eleven years later she sold 80 percent of the company to private equity company AEA, retaining a 20 percent share and a seat on the board. In 2007, Burt’s Bees was sold to Clorox for $925 million. An avowed environmentalist, Quimby still maintains a big role in nature conservancy through her Quimby Family Foundation. The foundation’s mission is to establish significant areas of wilderness in the state of Maine and to protect those lands for the enjoyment of future generations. Quimby also envisions equal accessibility for Maine residents to the arts in all forms. Quimby now lives part of the year in Palm Beach, where she drives her old pickup truck to fetch her mail. She says, “Why get rid of something that works even if it has three hundred thousand miles on it? I’m too cheap to do that.”
The founder and chairman of Nike. The accountant-turned-marketing guru behind the “Just Do It!” campaign—one of the most effective advertising campaigns in history—is a former track star at the University of Oregon who was never satisfied with the quality of running shoes. He believed that better shoes could create better running performance. His coach, Bill Bowerman, the most influential person in his business life, had experimented with his wife’s waffle iron to make advanced running shoes, and Knight saw the opportunity to improve the sport with better shoes. After a year stint in the army, Knight went to Stanford Business School and, according to the Stanford alumni magazine, had his aha moment when his professor described the characteristics of an entrepreneur and he said, “That’s me.” He and Bowerman founded Blue Ribbon Sports, which would later become Nike. The Nike swoosh has given Knight a net worth of $10 billion. After stepping down from the CEO spot in 2005, Knight has found time to go back to school at Stanford University. He most likely pays no tuition for his audited courses, since he has given the Stanford Graduate School of Business a $105 million donation, the largest in the school’s history.
Nelson is the founder and CEO of Providence Equity Partners, Inc., the private equity powerhouse that currently owns movie studio MGM; sports channels Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network, Inc.; and Hulu, an online-video-on-demand service providing streaming video of TV shows and movies right to your computer. He recently completed the largest leveraged buyout in history, purchasing Bell Canada for $50 billion. The Brown University graduate and Harvard MBA is known for his low-key style and big media turnarounds. His company has turned around and made huge profits on Western Wireless (now AllTell) and Voice Stream Wireless Corporation—which became T-Mobile and was sold to Deutsche Telekom for $24 billion. Nelson learned at Brown University how to find his perfect pitch. He certainly has.
The founder and chairman of General Parts, Inc., the nation’s third largest automotive parts company, which is also the largest privately held company in North Carolina. Worth $2.5 billion, it’s one of the firms that Wall Street investment banks can’t wait to get their hooks into. They can hold on to those hooks, though—Duke graduate Sloan has no plans to go public. He’s a private man and likes running a private company, though his employees are owners as well through an employee stock option program. He’s also the big man on the boards of Bank of America and the Lowe’s Companies, Inc.
Founder of payroll processing company Paychex, the source of the billion-dollar fortune that allowed him to run for governor of New York three times: in 1994, 1998, and 2002, on the Independent Party ticket. Golisano also owns the NHL team Buffalo Sabres and the Buffalo Bandits lacrosse team and runs the Golisano Foundation, which invests most of its money in Rochester and northwestern New York colleges and charitable causes. Thanks to a $14 million donation, the SUNY graduate now has his name atop the prestigious Rochester Institute of Technology’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.
The founder of McAfee Software, the largest anti-virus software company in the world, is currently co-founder and owner of an aerotrekking company called Sky Gypsies. He sold McAfee in 1999 and now spends his time flying air trikes—contraptions that look like motorcycles with wings, which allow you to soar mere feet above the ground over the painted canyons of New Mexico and Arizona. The software-engineer-turned-yoga-teacher-turned-desert-aerotrekker built a new town in New Mexico replete with its own coffee shop and movie theater to satiate his current passion. McAfee has created a new world for himself, eschewing the material world for more transformative experiences. He says in his New Age vernacular, “Be skeptical of the majority. Meet every event fresh, unencumbered by presuppositions. If we all walked the same road, there could be no discoveries, no mysteries, no new things. So make your own path.” He is making his new path far from Silicon Valley where his multimillion-dollar fortune was created. In fact, he doesn’t even use a computer much anymore. Don’t e-mail him, just call him at the coffee shop in Rodeo.
Founder and owner of the Buzz Oates Group of Companies, the largest commercial real estate and management company in Sacramento and the source of his billion-dollar fortune. His early aspiration was simply to own a shop that manufactured keys. A former fighter pilot, he accomplished his dream with the $2,000 he saved from his air force pay. His A&A Key Shop grew into a building supply company, which allowed him to begin building and owning commercial real estate. When he was in the seventh grade, the teacher asked all the kids that age-old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” His fellow students offered the usual professions: firefighter, police officer, doctor, lawyer. Oates blurted, “I want to make keys.” The class erupted in laughter, but no one is laughing now.
The founder of $10 billion Huntsman Corporation, a chemical conglomerate. A devout Mormon, Huntsman is Utah’s most famous billionaire and also happens to be the father of Utah’s current governor. His name rests proudly on the main building at the Wharton School of Business, the main arena at the University of Utah, and the law library at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Winners Never Cheat: Everyday Values We Learned as Children (But May Have Forgotten). His passion currently is the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. He is not slowing down. Huntsman is building another business empire through his newly established $1.4 billion private equity group. He’s also trying his hand at real estate development in the Grand Tetons of Idaho.
A natural-born salesman and businessman, McCombs left the University of Texas Law School to begin his career as a car salesman. Not content to work for the other guy, he soon became the sole owner of Red McCombs Automotive, which is today Texas’s largest automobile group, selling Ford, GMC, Pontiac, Scion, and Toyota. He is co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment conglomerate; owns McCombs Energy in Houston; and is a major commercial real estate owner and developer in Texas. He once owned the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets and the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings before selling all three franchises for mucho profits. The University of Texas named its business school the McCombs School of Business.
Multibillionaire investment wizard and author of Value Investing Today, Brandes is a disciple of Benjamin Graham, the economist and professional investor who was the original proponent of the value investing principles that the world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, and Brandes practice today. Brandes Investment Partners manages $95 billion and favors out-of-favor stocks that he believes have intrinsic value.
The co-founder and chairman of Coldwater Creek (NASDAQ:CWTR), the women’s specialty apparel company. The retail and catalog empire was created by Pence and his former wife, Ann, in 1984 to give older women fashionable, yet affordable, choices in clothing. They launched the catalog-only line of women’s accessories and a few Native American–inspired gifts with their $40,000 life savings. Although their marriage didn’t last, the company has. Today Coldwater Creek has a market cap of half a billion dollars.
The LEGO-loving co-founder of the Google juggernaut. This East Lansing, Michigan, native got his tech savvy genetically: His mother and father both taught computer programming at Michigan State University. His father later joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Larry received his undergraduate degree. It was in graduate school at Stanford University, however, that his life changed dramatically. He met his Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, and both went on to build the world’s most powerful search engine.
The founder of the Jepson Corporation, which he created for the express purpose of buying undervalued, distressed companies. He successfully turned around nineteen companies and ultimately sold them all at handsome profits. “It was nineteen deals made in heaven,” says Jepson. This success allowed the Jepson Corporation to become the fifth-fastest-growing public company in America in the 1980s. He says, “It was Shangri-la. We minted many millionaires.” Shortly after the sale of the company, in 1989, he was lured out of early retirement to become the CEO and chairman of Kuhlman, an electric transformer company with a market cap of $70 million. He moved the Kuhlman headquarters to Savannah, diversified by buying competing market leaders, and turned the firm into a billion-dollar concern within six years before selling it to Borg Warner in 1999. The third leg of the wealth-creation stool was Tulsa, Oklahoma–based Coburn Optical Industries, maker of the machinery responsible for edging, polishing, and shaping eyeglass lenses. Jepson bought it all for debt and sold the company in 2000. Today he runs his family office and spreads his wealth generously, especially to the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.
The founder and chairman of Discount Tires, a multibillion-dollar tire company that changes flat tires even if you bought them from someone else. From humble beginnings, the former marine first sold cars and insurance before finding his perfect pitch selling automobile tires. He started with one dilapidated store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and today has more than seven hundred pristine stores in nineteen states. Virtually all of his executives started out in the company changing tires, just as he did. Halle’s philosophy is, “Be fair, be truthful, work hard, be there on time, and help people.” Helping people has helped Halle build one heck of a company, which he says is still the best reason to wake up in the morning—even more than forty years later. “There is nothing more fulfilling than owning your own business and seeing that business create jobs for good people and value for good customers.”
Who doesn’t know the third richest man in the world? Gates is still today the largest single shareholder of Microsoft, even though he is spending the majority of his time running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—the largest foundation in the world. A middle child from a prosperous Seattle family, he nevertheless proved highly ambitious—ambitious enough to drop out of Harvard when he realized that Intel had manufactured a chip affordable enough to create the personal computer revolution, and that software would be the brains of all those computers.
The majority owner of First Premier Bank and Premier Bankcard, which deals in subprime credit cards. The Minneapolis native located his company in Sioux City because of lenient anti-usury laws. He vows to die broke, spending most of his $3 billion fortune on philanthropy. Sanford has already given $400 million to create the Sanford Health Center, formerly known as Sioux Valley Hospitals and Health System, which he hopes will someday soon have the cachet of the Mayo Clinic. Sanford has tennis shoes that read WOLT—World’s Oldest Living Teenager.
The former attorney, South Carolina legislator, South Carolina state development board chairman, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce president, and president of Blockbuster and Extended Stay America is one of the nation’s busiest and most successful entrepreneurs. The oldest of three sons, Johnson graduated from Wofford College and received his law degree from the University of South Carolina. He began his entrepreneurial career in the grading business and graduated to the waste disposal business, a company that he sold to Wayne Huizenga of Waste Management. This was the beginning of a lifelong partnership. He joined Huizenga at Blockbuster and enjoyed one of the great entrepreneurial rides of all time. They eventually sold Blockbuster to Viacom for $8.4 billion. Johnson then developed the concept for the hotel chain Extended Stay America. Its first hotel opened in August 1995 in Spartanburg; the company went public in December 1995 and was sold to Blackstone for more than $3 billion. Johnson is chairman of Johnson Development Associates, which controls over four million square feet of industrial office and retail space in the Carolinas. He is chairman of Advance America Cash Advance Centers, which has more than seven hundred branches nationwide, and is managing general partner of American Storage Limited, a chain of twenty-six mini warehouses. Johnson is a director of Extended Stay America, AutoNation, Inc., Florida Panthers Holdings, Inc., Duke Energy Corporation, William Barnet and Son, Inc., and Morgan Corporation, Inc. He and partner Huizenga are now creating a new hotel company called OTO. There is nothing slow about Johnson other than his accent.
The biggest real estate developer in his hometown, Douglass builds single- and multifamily homes, sits on the board of Northwest Bank, and invests in local companies such as Eagle Hardware and Garden.
Chairman of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The former World War II navy Hellcat fighter pilot served aboard the USS Enterprise before building what has become the largest car rental company in the country. He now owns National Car Rental and Alamo as well. Worth more than $14 billion, Taylor developed his love of cars as a salesman for a Cadillac dealership in St. Louis. He worked his way up to sales manager and convinced his boss to let him set up a car leasing business at the dealership. Taylor offered to take a 50 percent pay cut and put up $25,000 of his own money to own 25 percent of the leasing business. That business became Enterprise Rent-A-Car, one of the largest privately held companies in the country. The company today has over fifty-five hundred stores and still abides by Taylor’s original philosophy: “Take care of your customers and employees first and profits will follow.”
Founder of the Pyramid Companies, which he started in 1970 and still runs today. Congel claims that Pyramid is the largest privately owned developer of malls and entertainment complexes in America. Under his leadership, Pyramid built, owns, and manages sixteen shopping centers in New York and four in Massachusetts totaling more than 19.2 million square feet. According to the Pyramid Web site, Congel’s company generates approximately $5 billion in annual sales.
Founder, chairman, and CEO of HCR Manor Care, Inc., the largest long-term care company in the United States, which was bought by the Carlyle Group (helmed by David Rubenstein, Washington, DC’s RMIT) in late 2007 for $6.3 billion. This was a big payday for the CEO—who was already one of the highest paid in America. Ormond continues to lead the company he built after the leveraged buyout. HCR Manor Care has a network of more than five hundred nursing homes, assisted living facilities, outpatient rehabilitation clinics, hospice and home care agencies, and approximately sixty thousand employees. Ormond received his MBA from Stanford.
Governor of New Jersey, he made his fortune on Wall Street when he served as the CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the most prestigious investment banks in America. Now the richest self-made governor in history, with a fortune just under the half-billion-dollar mark, Corzine is a farm boy who grew up in Willey Station, Illinois. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and received an MBA from the University of Chicago School of Business.
This Oklahoma native moved to Tucson in 1971 and quickly made his mark, becoming one of the youngest automotive dealers in the country by age twenty-seven. Since then, he and his cousin Bob Tuttle have built up an impressive array of dealerships in Tucson and Orange County, California. They also purchased a controlling interest in Union Bank in 1978. It later became Arizona Bank, before being purchased by Compass Bank, where Click continues to serve on the board of directors. He has lived by his father’s creed, “Find something you truly love to do and retire for the rest of your life.” Click may live in retirement land, but he is anything but retiring, and he never plans to stop working.
The patriarch of Alabama’s first family of pharmacy in Tuscaloosa. Harrison began with one small mom-and-pop pharmacy (his parents’) and turned Harco into one of the largest drugstore chains in the country before selling to Rite Aid in 1997. Harco, Inc., was founded in 1967, and Harrison ultimately built and operated 153 Harco Drug stores, fifty-five Carport Auto Parts stores, and seven Harco Totalcare (home health care) stores. The Harrison name sits atop the Auburn University School of Pharmacy. He says, “I’m the happiest guy on earth. I have a great family, I have had three great companies, and with my foundation work today, I’m doing something I love more than anything I have ever done in my life.”
Co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity investment companies in the world, with more than $80 billion under management. From very modest circumstances in Baltimore, he raised himself to the top echelons of political power as a domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter before creating his $3-plus-billion fortune buying and selling companies. Rubenstein, who raises the cash for Carlyle, is a lawyer by training, a salesman by practice. He seemingly sits on virtually every cultural board in America, from the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to Lincoln Center in New York. Rubenstein purchased the 710-year-old Magna Carta from Ross Perot for $21.3 million (it now resides at the National Archives) and underwrote the discovery of an ancient Torah found buried in Auschwitz.
The billionaire best friend of Donald Trump made his fortune in casinos, convenience stores, real estate, and hand trucks. Ruffin is the owner of New Frontier Casino in Las Vegas, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, and several acres right on the Vegas Strip. He got his start in the convenience store business in 1959 without any financial partners and believes strongly that you don’t get rich working for someone else. Ruffin does not believe in God; he believes in living life to the fullest, and he does.
The co-founder of MBNA—Maryland Bank National Association, the pioneer of the affinity credit card marketing business now owned by Bank of America. The Georgetown graduate built MBNA alongside Alfred Lerner in the bowels of an abandoned supermarket and turned it into one of the fifty most profitable companies in America.
He first convinced his alma mater to sponsor a credit card for Georgetown alumni. This led to more than three thousand affinity groups following suit: universities, lawyers, doctors, nurses—you name it. He thought these affinity groups would keep users from searching for cards with lower interest rates. He was right. Along his success journey, he became a symbol of corporate excess, having earned over $50 million a year in salary and lavishly using corporate jets to entertain the Bush family and Washington heavies. He stepped down after a contentious board fight in 2004, according to the New York Times. Cawley racked up a huge fortune, though, with a simple philosophy of business and life: “Life by the inch is a cinch… life by the yard is hard.”
This Bronx-born billionaire founded Software Development Labs, which ultimately became Oracle Software, the principal wealth-creation mechanism of his $25 billion net worth (he owns 20 percent of Oracle). Adopted by his aunt and uncle, Ellison was raised in Chicago. His best buddy is Apple’s Steve Jobs. Thrice divorced, and famous for his spending habits, it’s a wonder he is one of the richest people in America. He has all the billionaire toys: the yacht, the $200 million Japanese mansion complete with a reproduction seventeenth-century Kyoto teahouse. He has been cautioned by his financial advisers that even a billionaire needs a budget. Mike Wilson penned the story of his life, titled The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison. The not-so-subtle subtitle reads: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.