The Richest Person In Every State
It’s a question we were asked often enough that it deserved an answer. So for the first time ever, FORBES offers a unique road map to wealth in America with
a list of the richest person in each state. Look through this atlas at its carefully cataloged billionaires and near-billionaires, and you’ll spot some familiar names. In New York, the richest is lightning-rod industrialist
David Koch. On the opposite coast, it’s
Oracle ORCL -2.48% founder
Larry Ellison in California. Others will surprise. About one-fifth of the United States emerged as a question mark when we started, meaning that no one from those states was currently included in our annual chronicle of the world’s billionaires. With this in mind, a team of reporters (Dan Alexander, Kerry Close, Maggie McGrath,
Chase Chase Peterson-Withorn and Rebecca Spalding) examined the great fortunes of 10 states: Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont.
To compile this list, we not only tracked down easier-to-value public assets, but we dug up valuations of more difficult-to-assess private ones—oil wells in New Mexico, coal mines in Alabama, properties on the Vegas strip. Through careful estimation, 12 names emerged (with pairs of siblings tied for the top spot in Delaware and Maine). Four had appeared on FORBES’ rich lists before, like Vermont’s
John Abele ($600 million), co-founder of Boston Scientific. Most are newcomers, such hotelier Gary Tharaldson ($930 million) in North Dakota and money manager Robert Gillam ($320 million) in Alaska. Many of these fortunes stand as ten-digit monuments to the American dream. Only 10 of the 50 are largely do-nothing heirs while the rest have either built their riches from scratch or inherited a company and grown it greatly. In the end, our reporting offers another marker of the entrepreneurial drive that pushed the country to 50 states in the first place.
Roughly three-quarters of the top ranked by states could’ve earned a spot on last year’s FORBES 400, and 10 fortunes rank among the Top 20 in America. Washington is home to the wealthiest (Bill Gates, $78.8 billion), while a little farther north, Alaska hosts the list’s poorest rich person (the aforementioned Gillam). Just
six states (Alabama, North Dakota, Delaware, New Mexico, Vermont and Alaska) have no billionaires. Public fortunes were calculated using April 23 stock prices.
