Richest Person of All Time From Every State

Lumber magnate Jimmy Rane, who advertises his company Great Southern Wood Preserving by posing as his alter ego Yella Fella, is Alabama’s wealthiest person. Rane, whose net worth is estimated at $900 million, continues to live in his small hometown of Abbeville.

Jonathan Rubini and Leonard Hyde are two of Alaska’s biggest names in real estate. The two own real estate development and management company JL Properties, which controls many properties in Anchorage, including the state’s tallest building, the ConocoPhillips Tower. With equal ownership of the business, Rubini and Hyde are worth an estimated $300 million each.

Arizona’s Ernest Garcia has made his fortune in the automotive business. He owns major used car retailer DriveTime Automotive and is the largest shareholder of online used car selling platform Carvana. Garcia’s net worth has skyrocketed in recent months — from $2.4 billion in April 2020 to $12.5 billion in August as Carvana’s stock price climbed from less than $30 a share in March to over $180 in September.

Garcia and his son Ernie Garcia III are now facing a lawsuit from shareholders accusing them of insider trading. The suit claims the two took advantage of the stock price drop caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to buy shares, knowing Carvana was in a strong financial position.

Alice Walton is the daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton and an avid art collector. Walton opened the Crystal Bridges modern art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas — the location of Walmart’s headquarters — filled it with the works of modern masters such as Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and co-founder of social media site Facebook, is California’s wealthiest resident and the fourth wealthiest person in the world. With an estimated net worth of $95.6 billion he is one of the wealthiest people in U.S. history.

Philip Anschutz has become one of the wealthiest people in the world by investing in several businesses, including oil, railroads, real estate, and entertainment. His Anschutz Entertainment Group owns and operates arenas and stadiums across the globe — which have largely stood empty in recent months. The Denver resident has donated over $100 million to the University of Colorado’s medical center, which was named in his honor.

J.P. Morgan was an American businessman who dominated banking and finance during America’s Gilded Age and the early 20th century. Morgan, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1837, was instrumental in the formation of some of the nation’s most prominent companies, such as General Electric and U.S. Steel. He was also one of the driving forces behind the economic expansion of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Morgan died in Rome, Italy in 1913. Today, his fortune would have the buying power of about $47.4 billion.

Alfred du Pont was worth an estimated $100 million in 1928, the equivalent of nearly $1.5 billion in 2020 dollars. Hailing from the prestigious du Pont family, Alfred guided the family business through World War I, which turned out to be especially lucrative for the DuPont company because it manufactured gunpowder. The company has since pivoted into making consumer goods such as textiles and plastics. Though the du Pont family fortune is an estimated $14.3 billion, it is spread among over 3,000 family members.

Ken Griffin, who has family ties in South Florida, founded the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, which manages about $34 billion in assets. As a college student, Griffin demonstrated his financial acumen by trading stock from his Harvard dorm room and installing a satellite dish on the roof of his dorm to get real-time quotes. Griffin has spent lavishly for homes in London, New York, and Palm Beach, where he has several oceanfront properties. He is also a patron of culture, and last October, he donated $125 million to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the largest gift in the museum’s history

Brothers Dan and Bubba Cathy operate the fried-chicken fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, the biggest chicken chain in the United States with 2,370 stores. The company’s owners are deeply religious and do not open their stores on Sunday. In the past, Chick-fil-A has been criticized and even boycotted over its opposition to same-sex marriage. Criticism of the company has eased as the company has shifted to address issues such as education and homelessness.

Though he made his fortune from his family’s Atlanta-based telecom company Cox Enterprises, Jim Kennedy spent his childhood in Hawaii. His grandfather founded Cox Enterprises over 120 years ago, and Kennedy himself served as the company’s CEO for 20 years and remains its chairman.

Idaho’s all-time richest person is Frank VanderSloot, the founder and long-time head of consumer products and supplements company Melaleuca. VanderSloot has helmed the company since its start in 1985.

Though he was born in New York City and made his fortune in California’s Silicon Valley, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corporation, spent nearly all of his childhood in Illinois. After dropping out of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago, Ellison moved to California and co-founded the software giant. Ellison served as Oracle’s CEO for nearly 40 years, before relinquishing the position in 2014. He still owns over one-third of the company and remains one of the 10 richest people in the world.

Carl Cook of Bloomington, Indiana, is the CEO of Cook Group, a long-time maker of medical equipment. The company specializes in devices used in minimally invasive surgery such as stents and filters. Carl inherited control of Cook Group from his parents, who founded the company. With a net worth of $10.5 billion, Cook is the wealthiest person in the state’s history.

Julia Koch became one of the wealthiest people in the world after inheriting a 42% stake in Koch Industries from her late husband David Koch, who died in 2019. Born and raised in Iowa, Koch worked as a fashion designer’s assistant after moving to New York City, where she met David Koch in 1991. Koch now serves as the president for the David F. Koch Foundation, which has donated nearly $200 million to various philanthropic causes such as medical research and the arts.

Kansas’ Charles Koch, along with his late brother David, made their fortune running and growing Koch Industries, which has operations in many industries, including paper products, chemical manufacturing, and oil pipelines. The Koch brothers have been known for their philanthropy, their participation in the American political system, and for their financial support of conservative candidates.

Tamara Gustavson is the largest shareholder of self storage company Public Storage, which was co-founded by her father, B. Wayne Hughes, in 1972. Controlling 11% of the company, Gustavson has a net worth of $4.8 billion. She also sits on Public Storage’s board as well as on the board of American Homes 4 Rent, which was also founded by her father. Gustavson lives on her family’s horse breeding farm, Spendthrift Farm, in Lexington, Kentucky.

Gayle Benson became the wealthiest person in Louisiana following the death of her husband, Tom Benson, in 2018. A legal battle with Tom’s children and grandchildren, who claimed he was mentally unfit when he gave her control of his assets, was eventually settled. Benson now owns both of New Orleans’ pro sports teams, the Pelicans and the Saints.

Cyrus H.K. Curtis has been called the founder of the modern magazine. Curtis launched magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and later bought other publications, including The Saturday Evening Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was also a noted philanthropist who donated to universities in the Philadelphia area, medical schools, hospitals, and the Franklin Institute.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born in Moscow in 1973. His family immigrated to the United States to escape discrimination against Jews and settled in Maryland. Brin and Larry Page, another Stanford computer science student, created Google together. Their mission was to create an internet search engine that would rank the results according to what was most popular. Brin has been a billionaire since 2004, when Google went public.

Even though Marshall Field is associated with Chicago, he was actually from Massachusetts, born on a farm in the town of Conway. Field earned a fortune from his eponymous chain of department stores. He moved to Chicago at 19 and started a job at a mercantile house and worked his way up the store ranks to become a partner of the firm. He eventually bought out his partners and renamed his enterprise’s stores Marshall Field and Company at age 46. The company’s famous six-story store in Chicago catered to the tastes of urban women and operated under the slogan, “Give the lady what she wants.”

Steve Ballmer was one of Microsoft Corp.’s first business managers, joining the company in 1980. His fortune is largely tied to his affiliation with the company, which became one of the world’s leaders in software products. Ballmer became Microsoft’s CEO in 2000 and led the company for 14 years. After retiring from Microsoft in 2014, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA for $2 billion. Ballmer, a native of Detroit, has spent millions to help nonprofits in southeastern Michigan.

Whitney MacMillan, who died in March at age 90, was the heir to Minneapolis-based food and agricultural company Cargill Inc., one of America’s largest privately held companies by revenue. The company has customers in more than 125 countries. He served as company CEO before he retired in 1995 after serving for 19 years. The company was founded by his great-grandfather, W.W. Cargill, in 1865.

Brothers James and Thomas Duff inherited their father’s tire business, Southern Tire Mart, in 1983 and turned it into the largest truck tire distributor in the nation. The brothers diversified their interests, funding in 2007 Duff Capital, which acquired several businesses over the years. The billionaire brothers are the richest people in Mississippi, each with a net worth of $1.4 billion.

John Doerr, who was born in St. Louis, was chairman of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which helped finance Amazon, AOL, Electronic Arts, and Google. It was Doerr, a disciple of semiconductor pioneer Andrew Grove, who helmed the investment in Google in 1999 that helped propel the company to today’s internet search engine giant. Doerr left Kleiner Perkins in 2016 and has devoted his time since to issues such as climate change, public education, and global poverty.

With an estimated net worth of $6.1 billion, Dennis Washington is the wealthiest person in Montana. Through Washington Companies, he owns a diversified group of businesses that span several industries such as shipping, rail transport, and diamond mining. Washington has given over $800 million to the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation, a charitable organization.

One of the most successful investors in history, Warren Buffett is worth an estimated $88.3 billion. “The Oracle of Omaha” is not only the wealthiest person in Nebraska, but also the third richest person in America. Buffett is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate that partly or wholly owns dozens of companies, including Geico, Duracell, and Kraft Heinz. Buffett was born in Omaha in 1930 and has lived there with his family continuously since 1956.

Brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta have built their fortune by operating and expanding mixed martial arts promoter UFC. They purchased UFC in 2001 for $2 million and sold it to an investment group in 2016 for $4 billion. The brothers own Red Rock Resorts, which was founded by their father, Frank. They took the company public in 2016.

New Hampshire is one of just a handful of states that has yet to produce a billionaire. Even the state’s wealthiest resident, Andrea Reimann-Ciardelli, is from Germany. The wealthiest person from New Hampshire is comedian and actor Adam Sandler, who was raised in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 2020, Sandler’s production company, Happy Madison, has signed a third nine-figure movie deal with Netflix. Altogether, these deals have been worth more than $775 million. This has pushed Sandler’s net worth to an estimated $420 million.

John Insley Blair, the son of Scottish immigrants, was born and raised in western New Jersey in the early 19th century and became an entrepreneur, banker, and railroad builder. At one point, Blair owned 2 million acres and was the largest individual landholder in the United States. Blair was a devout Presbyterian who donated his wealth to churches and educational institutions such as Princeton University, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and Grinnell College in Iowa. Blairstown in Warren County, New Jersey, is named after him.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, is the wealthiest person in the world, with a current net worth of $188.8 billion. Though Bezos lives in Seattle where he made his fortune, he spent his early childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As e-commerce has taken on an increasingly important role in day-to-day life, already before the pandemic and certainly since, Bezos’ net worth has skyrocketed, up from $113 billion in April.

John D. Rockefeller is one of the most successful businessmen of all time. His last name has even become synonymous with extravagant wealth and power. Rockefeller grew his vast empire in the 19th century and early 20th century by establishing a standard for oil quality and strived to run his company, Standard Oil, at peak efficiency. He gained his wealth at a time when the U.S. was expanding rapidly and building up its manufacturing and transportation infrastructure. Rockefeller was probably the nation’s first billionaire and possibly the wealthiest American ever. His wealth represented 2% of the U.S. gross domestic product in 1916.

With an estimated net worth of $6.5 billion, James Goodnight is the wealthiest person in North Carolina. Goodnight made his fortune in the software industry, founding analytics software company SAS in 1976. The company is currently the largest employer in Cary, North Carolina, where Goodnight lives.

Gary Tharaldson, the Fargo-based builder and operator of hundreds of hotels across the country through Tharaldson Companies, is the only billionaire in North Dakota. Tharaldson sold 130 of his hotels for $1.2 billion to Goldman Sachs in 2006.

Les Wexner is the founder and CEO of L Brands, a fashion retailer that owns flagship brands such as Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. In February 2020, Wexner announced he would step down as the CEO and sell a majority stake in L Brands to a private equity firm, but the firm said in April it intends to back out of the deal.

Walmart is America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, and its success has largely been guided by its founder, Sam Walton, who showed that a large discount store could flourish in rural areas of the United States. Walton expanded his first retail efforts from overseeing a single franchised store of the Ben Franklin chain in Arkansas into managing 15 outlets of the chain. After he butted heads with the chain’s management, he decided to open his own stores. The first Walmart opened in 1962, and by 1976, the company was worth more than $176 million. The company was the world’s largest retailer by 2010.

Oregon native Phil Knight is also the state’s wealthiest resident. Knight and his former University of Oregon track coach founded the company that would become footwear behemoth Nike. Today, Nike is one of the largest employers in the state. Knight is also one of the state’s biggest philanthropists, having given more than $2 billion to several universities.

With an adjusted net worth of $115.9 billion in 2020 dollars, Richard Mellon is one of the 10 wealthiest Americans of all time. Mellon, along with his brother Andrew, made his fortune in banking, as the head of Mellon Bank in the early and mid-20th century. Mellon also diversified his wealth among other banks, as well as steel, railroads, coal, and oil.

Providence, Rhode Island, resident Jonathan Nelson is the co-founder and CEO of Providence Equity Partners. The company owns stakes in dozens of companies, largely in media, communications, and information.

Anita Zucker is CEO of the Charleston-based InterTech Group, a chemical manufacturing company. Zucker took over the position after her husband Jerry Zucker, who founded the company, passed away in 2008. In addition to her work, Zucker is also a noted philanthropist, giving millions of dollars to various educational causes throughout her home state of South Carolina.

T. Denny Sanford made much of his fortune with First Premier Bank. Sanford is now CEO of the bank’s holding company, United National Corporation. Sanford has committed much of his immense wealth to improving the lives of children in and around South Dakota. He has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to children’s hospitals and medical schools in the Midwest.

Thomas Frist Jr. founded Hospital Corporation of America with his father, Thomas Frist Sr., in 1968. Today, the company owns dozens of hospitals in the U.S. and the U.K. Frist’s net worth had dropped from $12 billion in 2019 to $7.5 billion in April 2020, mirroring the dip in HCA’s share price at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has since increased back to its prior level.

Born and raised in Houston, Michael Dell dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin after selling computers out of his dorm room proved to be profitable. He founded what is now Dell Technologies in 1984, and by 2001, the company was the largest PC manufacturer in the world. Dell is one of the 30 richest people in the world and has donated over $1 billion to his charity to fight childhood poverty.

Gail Miller is the head of the Larry H. Miller Group, which she started with her late husband, Larry. The group owns a wide variety of companies, including car dealerships and theater complexes. Miller is also the long-time owner of the state’s only major sports franchise, the NBA’s Utah Jazz. She recently placed ownership of the Jazz in the hands of a trust to make sure the team remains in-state for the foreseeable future, but Miller and her family continue to oversee operations.

Though John Abele is retired, he still has a small stake in Boston Scientific, a medical device company he co-founded in 1979. Abele was once a billionaire, but he donated much of his wealth, leaving him with $640 million.

Like the other billionaires in his family, the vast fortune of John Mars stems from his stake in the company his grandfather founded, Mars, Inc. The company makes some of the world’s most recognizable candies, including M&Ms, Snickers, and Twix. John and his sister Jacqueline each own a third of the company, and the rest is divided among the four daughters of his late brother Forrest Jr.

Though he is one of the three wealthiest people in the world, Bill Gates is not the wealthiest Washington resident — as Jeff Bezos also resides in the Seattle area. However, Bezos is from New Mexico, so Gates ranks as the wealthiest person from Washington state. Gates made his fortune co-founding the world’s largest PC software business, Microsoft, in 1975. As of March 2020, Gates no longer serves on Microsoft’s board. He currently chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, the world’s largest private charity foundation.

West Virginia’s wealthiest resident, Jim Justice II, owes his fortune to coal. He inherited a coal business from his father and still owns mines in five states. Justice was elected state governor, running as a Democrat, in 2016. He flipped parties to become a Republican six months after taking office. As of August 2020, he was running for reelection after defeating several primary challengers.

John Menard, Jr. derives his fortune from the home improvement store bearing his name, Menard’s. The business has over 300 locations around the Midwest.

Lukas Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, grew up in both Wyoming and California, and today he resides in the Jackson, Wyoming, area. After studying environmentally sustainable businesses in college, Walton now serves as the chair for Walmart’s environmental program committee.