Julia Margaret Flesher Koch:
Julia Margaret Flesher Koch (born April 12, 1962) is an American socialite and philanthropist who is the richest woman in the world. As of May 2025, her fortune was over $74.2 billion. She inherited her fortune from her husband, David Koch, who died in 2019.
Life
Julia Margaret Flesher was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on April 12, 1962. Her family came from a farming background, but when she was born, her parents, Margaret and Frederic Flesher, owned a furniture store called Flesher’s.
She spent her early childhood in Indianola, Iowa, then when she was eight years old, her family moved to Conway, Arkansas, where her parents started a clothing store called Peggy Frederic’s, which she considered “a beautiful, beautiful shop”.By 1998, her mother still lived in Conway, but her father had moved back to Indianola. After graduating from the University of Central Arkansas and working as a model, Flesher moved to New York City in 1984, where she worked as a fashion designer’s assistant and did fittings for Nancy Reagan.
She met David Koch on a blind date in January 1991, although they did not continue dating at the time. She later described her reaction: “I’m glad I met that man because now I know I never want to go out with him”.
However, the two met again at a party later that year and started dating. She stopped working in 1993, and they got married in May 1996 at David Koch’s house on Meadow Lane in Southampton. In December 1997, she made what the New York Times called her “New York society debut” at the Met Gala. She was co-chairwoman of the gala that year, along with Anna Wintour and Patrick McCarthy. McCarthy said she was “one of those people who occur in New York every few years…
She’s beautiful, she loves fashion, she knows how to entertain, she’s married to an extraordinarily rich man.”Julia and David Koch had three children. Fred Thompson (left), David Koch (center), and Julia Koch in 2007Julia and David Koch spent years living in an apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, but in 2004, they moved to an 18-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue.
According to 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building, David Koch bought the apartment for about $17 million from the Japanese government, which previously used it to house their permanent representative to the United Nations.[14] In 2018, the couple also bought an eight-bedroom townhouse in Manhattan from investor Joseph Chetrit for $40.25 million.
David Koch died in August 2019, and Julia Koch and their three children inherited 42% of Koch Industries. As a result, she was listed by Bloomberg as the richest woman in the world and was included on Forbes’ list of the 10 richest women in the world in 2020. In 2022, Koch put the apartment at 740 Park Avenue on the market; a spokesperson said that she wanted to sell it because she was spending more time at houses in Southampton and Palm Beach. Koch is on the board of directors of Koch Industries. She tends not to seek public attention.
Philanthropy
Koch is president of the David H. Koch Foundation, which says it has given over $200 million to causes related to science and medical research, education, and the arts as of 2022. She also established the Julia Koch Family Foundation, which donates to healthcare, educational, and cultural organizations. Between 2007 and 2017, Koch and her spouse donated an average of $63 million annually, including donations to the arts and medical research.
During her husband’s lifetime, they donated $1.2 billion to various causes such as the Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. In 2020, the David H. Koch fund donated about $1 million to Duke University, in 2021, it donated about $1 million to Columbia University, and in 2023, it gave $5 million to the Cox Science Center and Aquarium in Palm Beach, Florida.
From David Koch’s death to the beginning of 2023, the fund did not receive any additional revenue. In 2012, Koch made a $10 million gift to the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, creating the David H. and Julia Koch Research Program in Food Allergy Therapeutics within its Jaffe Food Allergy Institute. In 2016, she donated $10 million to establish the David & Julia Koch research clinic for allergy and asthma at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University.
Koch has also given to LSA Family Health Services and NYU Langone, establishing the Julia Koch Endowed Scholarship. Roy I. Davidovitch is the current Julia Koch Associate Professor of Orthopedic Surgery and director of NYU Langone’s Hip Center.
In 2024, she donated $75 million to NYU Langone through the Julia Koch Family Foundation for the construction of the Julia Koch Family Ambulatory Care Center, a medical office tower in West Palm Beach, Florida. Koch is a member of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Board of Trustees, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees, and the Venetian Heritage Foundation’s Board of Directors. She was formerly on the board of directors of the School of American Ballet.
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers:
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (10 July 1953) is a French entrepreneur, philanthropist, writer, and billionaire heiress. She is the second richest woman in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$88.2 billion as of July 2025, according to Forbes.
She is the only child of Liliane Bettencourt and the granddaughter of Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oréal. Her mother died in September 2017, after which her fortune tripled with her investments through her family holding company, Téthys Invest, and the high valuation of L’Oréal shares on the stock exchange.
Personal life
Raised to be Catholic, she has written several Bible commentaries. She is the only child and heir of Liliane Bettencourt. She married Jean-Pierre Meyers, a business executive and the grandson of a rabbi murdered at Auschwitz.
She converted to Judaism and they raised their children, Jean-Victor and Nicolas, as Jewish. Her marriage caused controversy because her grandfather Eugène Schueller, L’Oreal’s founder, had been prosecuted for collaboration with the Nazi government. Bettencourt Meyers and her family still own a 33 per cent stake in the company.
In 2008, she sued François-Marie Banier for taking money from her mother, and started proceedings to have her mother declared mentally incompetent. The revelations in the secret recordings that she used as evidence led to the Woerth–Bettencourt scandal. In December 2010, Bettencourt Meyers announced that she had settled out of court with both her mother and Banier. Her mother died in September 2017 when her net worth was about $39.5 billion. After a fire severely damaged Notre-Dame de Paris, Bettencourt Meyers and L’Oréal pledged $226 million to repair the cathedral.
Alice Louise Walton
Alice Louise Walton (born October 7, 1949) is an American billionaire and heiress to the fortune of Walmart as the daughter of founder Sam Walton. As of July 2025, Walton has an estimated net worth of $116 billion, making her the richest woman in the world and the 15th richest overall, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Early life and education
Walton was born in Newport, Arkansas. She was raised along with her three brothers in Bentonville, Arkansas, and graduated from Bentonville High School in 1966. She graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in economics.
Career
Walton at the 2011 Walmart Shareholders meeting. Early in her career, Walton was an equity analyst and money manager for First Commerce Corporation and headed investment activities at Arvest Bank Group.[6] She was also a broker for EF Hutton. In 1988, Walton founded Llama Company, an investment bank, where she was president, chairwoman, and CEO.
Walton was the first person to chair the Northwest Arkansas Council and played a major role in the development of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, which opened in 1998. At the time, the business and civic leaders of the Northwest Arkansas Council found a need for the $109 million regional airport in their corner of the state.[8] Walton provided $15 million in initial funding for construction, and Llama Company underwrote a $79.5 million bond.
The Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Authority recognized Walton’s contributions to the creation of the airport and named the terminal the Alice L. Walton Terminal Building.[9] She was inducted into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame in 2001. Llama Company closed in 1998. In his 1992 autobiography Made in America, Sam Walton remarked that Alice was “the most like me—a maverick—but even more volatile than I am.”
Art
Walton and her mother would often paint watercolors on camping trips. The first piece of art Walton purchased was a print of Picasso’s Blue Nude when she was ten years old; it cost her 5 weeks’ allowance. Her first museum-quality artwork purchase was of two Winslow Homer watercolors in the late 1980s.
In December 2004, Walton purchased art from the collection of Daniel and Rita Fraad at Sotheby’s in New York. In 2005, Walton purchased Asher Brown Durand’s celebrated painting, Kindred Spirits, in a sealed-bid auction for a purported US$35 million.
The 1849 painting, a tribute to Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, had been given to the New York Public Library in 1904 by Julia Bryant, the daughter of Romantic poet and New York newspaper publisher William Cullen Bryant, who is depicted in the painting with Cole. She has also purchased works by American painters Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, as well as a notable portrait of George Washington by Charles Willson Peale, in preparation for the opening of Crystal Bridges.
In 2009, Walton acquired Norman Rockwell’s “Rosie the Riveter” for $4.9 million. Walton’s attempt to quit smoking inspired her to purchase a painting reminiscent of an earlier painting by John Singer Sargent, by Alfred Maurer, which depicts a full-length woman smoking. Another painting, by Tom Wesselmann, titled “Smoker #9,
” depicts a hyper-realistic, disembodied hand and mouth smoking a cigarette. In a 2011 interview, she spoke about acquiring great works by other artists, including Marsden Hartley and Andrew Wyeth, saying that she loved the emotion and spirituality they expressed.
Other artists whose work Walton has purchased include Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Kehinde Wiley, and Titus Kaphar. Walton’s interest in art led to the Walton Family Foundation developing the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The architect Moshe Safdie designed the 200,000 square foot museum, which was built on 120 acres of Walton family land. Crystal Bridges opened in 2011 and has been visited more than 5 million times as of 2021. It is free to attend. Walton says her motivation for the museum was to give access to art to people who had never had it.
Political activity
Walton was the 20th-largest individual contributor to 527 committees in the U.S. presidential election of 2004, donating US$2.6 million to the conservative Progress for America group. As of January 2012, Walton had contributed $200,000 to Restore Our Future, the super PAC associated with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Walton donated $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee supporting Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, in 2016.
Philanthropy
In 2016, Walton donated $225 million among a total $407 million from Walmart heirs to the Walton Family Holdings Trust, which finances the family’s philanthropy. Walton formed the Alice L. Walton Foundation in 2017. The foundation promotes arts, education, health, and improving economic opportunity.
In 2020, the foundation gave the University of Central Arkansas $3 million in funding for its fine arts program. That year, the foundation also gave a $1.28 million grant to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to expand its program to provide healthy food in schools.
In 2022, Walton’s foundation gave a $3.5 million grant to the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank: $3 million to support construction of a food distribution center, and $500,000 to buy and distribute food. Also in 2017, Walton formed the Art Bridges Foundation. It partners with small and regional museums with less access to cultural resources.
The foundation provides funding, collects loans and traveling exhibits, and creates art programs with museums. Walton has said her goal is to reduce the amount of art kept in storage.
As of September 2021, the foundation had approximately 30 exhibits traveling throughout the United States. The Arts Bridges Fellows Program provides opportunities for people from historically underrepresented groups to work with its museum partners. Additionally, Walton has given $10 million to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and partnered with the Ford Foundation through Art Bridges to fund programs to improve diversity in arts leadership.
Healthcare
In 2019, Walton established the Whole Health Institute. The institute works with health systems, employers, and communities to build and expand access to holistic healthcare. In March 2021, Walton announced that the institute would build a non-profit medical school in Bentonville called the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine.
The school will focus on allopathic medicine, and graduates will receive a Doctor of Medicine degree.[31] The campus will be located near Crystal Bridges. Construction began in 2023, with the first class enrolling in 2025, pending accreditation. In 2021, the Alice L. Walton Foundation partnered with the Cleveland Clinic to evaluate health care in Northwest Arkansas.
Following that evaluation, in 2022, the foundation and Washington Regional Medical System announced plans to create a non-profit medical system aimed at training doctors in specialty care fields such as oncology, cardiology, and neurology.
Personal life
Walton married a prominent Louisiana investment banker in 1974 at age 24. They were divorced two and a half years later. According to Forbes, she married “the contractor who built her swimming pool” soon after, “but they, too, divorced quickly”.
Walton has been involved in multiple automobile accidents, one of them fatal to a pedestrian. She lost control of a rented Jeep during a 1983 Thanksgiving family reunion near Acapulco and plunged into a ravine, shattering her leg.
She was airlifted out of Mexico and underwent more than two dozen surgeries; she suffers lingering pain from her injuries. In April 1989, she struck and killed 50-year-old Oleta Hardin, who had stepped onto a road in Fayetteville, Arkansas. No charges were filed. In 1998, she hit a gas meter while driving under the influence of alcohol.
She paid a $925 fine. In 1998, Walton moved to a ranch in Millsap, Texas, named Walton’s Rocking W Ranch. An avid horse-lover, she was known for having an eye for determining which 2-month-olds would grow to be champion cutters. Walton listed the farm for sale in 2015 and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, citing the need to focus on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She moved back to Bentonville in 2020.
Jacqueline Mars:
Jacqueline Mars (born October 10, 1939) is an American heiress and investor. She is the daughter of Audrey Ruth (Meyer) and Forrest Mars Sr., and the granddaughter of Franklin Clarence Mars, founder of the American candy company Mars Inc.
As of November 2023, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated her net worth at US$46.6 billion, ranking her the 23rd-richest person in the world. In the annual ranking of the richest women in the world in 2023, Forbes estimated her fortune at $38.3 billion and placed her in fourth place.
Early life
Jacqueline Mars was born on October 10, 1939. She graduated from Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mars participated as an equestrian in many horse shows during her youth. She is a 1961 graduate of Bryn Mawr College, and her degree is in anthropology.
Career
Mars is an heiress among the members of the Mars family that founded and owns Mars Incorporated, holding shares in the company. As a member of the family, her shares of Mars, Inc. and other assets were estimated by Forbes magazine in April 2024 to be worth $38.5 billion, making her the 19th richest American, and #34 on its list of “The World’s Billionaires”.
Mars was active in Mars, Inc. from 1982, when she joined the company as food product group president. She spent the majority of her time working for the Mars Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit supported by the company. She retired in 2001. In June 2019, Forbes listed her as the wealthiest resident living in Virginia, with an estimated $28.1 billion net worth
Personal life
Mars married David H. Badger in 1961. They had three children: Alexandra Badger, born 1966 or 1967 (age 58–59), Stephen M. Badger, born c.1969 (age 55–56), and Christa M. Badger, born c.1975 (age 49–50). She divorced Badger in 1984. She married Harold ‘Hank’ Vogel in 1986, with whom she resided in Bedminster, New Jersey.
They divorced in 1994. Mars, like her siblings, is known for living frugally and avoiding the public eye. Mars is a trustee of the U.S. Equestrian Team. She owns a working organic farm that is protected in perpetuity by the Land Trust of Virginia.
2013 automobile crash
On October 4, 2013, at the age of 74, Mars was involved in a car crash on U.S. Route 50 in Aldie, near her home in The Plains in Northern Virginia.
Her vehicle crossed the highway center line and struck a Chrysler minivan carrying six passengers. One person died at the scene, and another, who was pregnant, subsequently miscarried. Mars was charged with reckless driving. She told a witness after the crash that she had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Mars subsequently pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of reckless driving, with tests having revealed no drugs, alcohol, or medications in her system that could have caused a blackout.
Philanthropy
Mars is the Chairman Emeritus of the board of directors for the Washington National Opera and is on the board of the National Sporting Library and Fine Arts Museum.
Mars also sits on the National Advisory Council of the Journey through Hallowed Ground, a foundation promoting American heritage in the region stretching from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, which is situated just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Mars is a routine donor to the League of Conservation Voters. She has also donated to the National Air and Space Museum, the Washington Performing Arts Society.
In 2011, she received the inaugural Heritage Award granted by the Foundation for the National Archives. In 2021, she made a $1.25 million donation to help house “Angels Unawares”, a sculpture by Timothy Schmalz, at The Catholic University of America.
Miriam Adelson:
The 78-year-old billionaire political donor, Miriam Adelson, was born in 1945, during the British Mandate of Palestine in the city of Tel Aviv, making her older than the State of Israel. She grew up in the occupied city of Haifa, with a wealthy father who was prominent in the Zionist Mapam Party, which aided in ethnically cleansing some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes between 1947-49.
Adelson served in the Israeli military and is both a citizen of Israel and the United States. Inheriting the wealth of notorious Republican Party mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, whom she married in 1991, she is now the 6th richest female billionaire in the United States and the richest Israeli alive.
On top of owning the Las Vegas Sands casino and resort corporation, Adelson also co-owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. She is also the publisher of Israel’s most-read newspaper, Israel Hayom, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, with her family members, giving her influence in the media sphere, too.
It was revealed that her late Husband, Sheldon Adelson, donated 20 million dollars to a Super PAC supporting the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, which was reportedly conditioned on Donald Trump recognizing occupied Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and moving the American embassy there.
Sheldon, who died in 2021, once said he was “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel.”During the 2012 US Presidential elections, Miriam Adelson was the largest female donor and spent around 46 million. Come 2016, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson were the largest donors throughout Donald Trump’s campaign, essentially bankrolling his presidential bid, making it no surprise that Trump would go on to be the most pro-Israel President in US history. The Rafah Invasion Timeline: Israel’s Long Build-Up To Invasion
Donald Trump
In February of this year, Miriam Adelson reportedly met with Donald Trump and agreed to finance his third bid to re-enter the White House. According to Politico, in May, Adelson agreed to contribute 90 million dollars to a pro-Trump Super PAC.
At that time, in order to demonstrate how significant such a contribution would be, the Biden campaign had around 84 million dollars in cash. It has been historically accurate to predict the outcome of US elections based on which side raises more funds. In early June, it was later revealed that after a little hesitation, Miriam Adelson had agreed to pledge a total of 100 million dollars to the Trump campaign in exchange for him to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the illegally occupied West Bank when President.
At a time when Donald Trump is being dealt financial blows due to multiple legal battles, Adelson’s support couldn’t have been more crucial. The move by Miriam Adelson is, in essence, a dual Israeli-US citizen who openly says she favors Israel and claims to have been trapped in the United States by her former husband, essentially buying off a potential US President to support Israel.
If what she was requesting was support for Israel, that wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary; however, Adelson seeks to bankroll Trump’s presidential bid to have him support Israel in violating international law and tearing up any hope of achieving a solution to the Palestine-Israeli conflict.
Meet Rafaela AponteDiamant:
Meet Rafaela AponteDiamant, The World’s Richest Self-Made Woman. With a net worth of $28.6 billion as of June 2023, Rafaela Aponte-Diamant is the world’s wealthiest self-made woman, according to Forbes’ 2023 Billionaires list. Here’s a glance into the life of the richest of the world’s 96 self-made women billionaires.
The ship bought was named after Rafaela. With the acquisition of the line Monterey in 1988, they expanded into cruises. Today, MSC has 675 offices across 155 countries with 150,000 employees. MSC’s shipping line sails on over 260 trade routes, calling at more than 520 ports.
The privately-owned company also operates in holiday cruises (MSC Cruises), inland logistics (Medlog), and port operations (Terminal Investment Limited). She has two children with Gianluigi— Alexa and Diego. Diego serves as group president of the family business. Rafaela Aponte-Diamant’s fortune is attributed to her 50% stake in the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) Group, the world’s largest shipping line. The other half is owned by her husband, Gianluigi.
The 78-year-old is the world’s 43rd richest person as per Forbes’ 2023 Billionaires ranking. The Swiss entrepreneur first met Gianluigi on a trip to the Italian island of Capri in the 1960s, when Gianluigi was a ship captain. The duo entered the shipping industry together in 1970 when they purchased a ship with a $200,000 loan. Their secondRafaela now focuses on the cruise ships’ interiors and serves on the board of the MSC Foundation. The Swiss couple both hold Italian citizenship, yet reside in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Aponte family established the MSC Foundation in 2018 to lead and coordinate conservation and humanitarian commitments globally. As of 2022, the MSC Foundation’s total donations had reached $12.9 million. In December 2022, MSC purchased Bolloré Africa Logistics, the African transport and logistics arm of the Bolloré Group, for $6 billion.
Susanne Klatten:
Susanne Hanna Ursula Klatten (née Quandt, born 28 April 1962) is a German billionaire heiress, the daughter of Herbert and Johanna Quandt. As of January 2022, her net worth was estimated at US$23.4 billion, and the richest woman in Germany and the 50th richest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Education
Klatten was born in Bad Homburg, West Germany. After gaining a degree in business finance, she worked for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam in Frankfurt from 1981 to 1983.
This was followed by a course in marketing and management at the University of Buckingham, and an MBA from IMD Business School in Lausanne, specialising in advertising. She gained further business experience in London with Dresdner Bank, the Munich branch of management consultants McKinsey, and the bank Bankhaus Reuschel & Co.
She has often worked under the name Susanne Kant. Klatten has received several honorary titles, including Honorary Senator of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2004, and is an Honorary Graduate at the University of Buckingham in 2022.
Investments
On her father’s death, she inherited his 50.1% stake in pharmaceutical and chemicals manufacturer Altana. She sits on Altana’s supervisory board and helped transform it into a world-class corporation in the German DAX list of 30 top companies. In 2006, Altana AG sold its pharmaceutical activities to Nycomed for €4.5 billion, leaving only its speciality chemicals business.
The €4.5 billion was distributed to shareholders as a dividend. Altana maintained its stock exchange listing, and Klatten remained its majority shareholder. In 2009, she bought almost all shares she did not already own in Altana. Altana and SKion, which are both wholly owned by Susanne Klatten, are shareholders of Landa Digital Printing with together 46% since 2018. Landa Digital Printing is a company of the Israeli entrepreneur and inventor Benny Landa in the field of digital printing and nanotechnology. Her father also left her a 12.50% stake in BMW, which increased to 19.2% following the death of her mother in 2015.
She was appointed to the supervisory board of BMW with her brother, Stefan Quand, in 1997. German graphite maker SGL Carbon said on 16 March 2009 that Klatten owns options to raise her stake in SGL from 8% to almost a quarter of the shares, but no more than that.
Quandt family activities during WWII
The Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award-winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War.
The family’s Nazi past was not well known, but the documentary film revealed this to a wide audience and confronted the Quandts about the use of slave labourers in the family’s factories during World War II. As a result, five days after the showing, four family members announced, on behalf of the entire Quandt family, their intention to fund a research project in which a historian would examine the family’s activities during Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. The independent 1,200-page study researched and compiled by Bonn historian, Joachim Scholtyseck, that was released in 2011, concluded:
“The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis”.
As of 2008, no compensation, apology, or even memorial at the site of one of their factories has been permitted. BMW was not implicated in the report.
Personal life
Police prevented an attempt to kidnap her and her mother, Johanna Quandt, in 1978. Susanne met Jan Klatten while she was doing an internship with BMW in Regensburg, where he worked as an engineer.
It is reported that during this time, she called herself Kant and did not tell him who she was until they were sure about each other, but Klatten himself denies the story. They married in 1990 in Kitzbühel and live in Munich. They have three children. The couple separated in 2018.
She has been a member of the University Council of the Technical University of Munich since 2005. In 2007, she was awarded the Bayerischer Verdienstorden, the Bavarian Order of Merit. She is one of the biggest donors to the centre-right political party, the Christian Democratic Union. In 2007, Klatten was blackmailed by Helg “Russak” Sgarbi, a 44-year-old Swiss national who threatened to release reported evidence depicting the two having an affair.
Sgarbi, who was charged with similar blackmail schemes against multiple women, was arrested in January 2009 and brought to court in Germany, where he was sentenced to six years in jail. His accomplice, Italian hotel owner Ernano Barretta, had allegedly filmed Sgarbi and Klatten with hidden cameras. Barretta was also arrested and was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2012.
Gina Rinehart:
Georgina Hope Rinehart (born 9 February 1954) is an Australian heiress, billionaire mining magnate, and businesswoman. She is the executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father, Lang Hancock.
Rinehart was born in Perth, Western Australia, and spent her early years in the Pilbara region. She boarded at St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls and then briefly studied at the University of Sydney, dropping out to work with her father at Hancock Prospecting. She was Lang Hancock’s only child, and when he died in 1992, she succeeded him as executive chairwoman.
Rinehart oversaw an expansion of the company over the following decade, and due to the iron ore boom of the early 2000s, became a nominal billionaire in 2006. In the 2010s, Rinehart began to expand her holdings into areas outside the mining industry. She made sizeable investments in Ten Network Holdings and Fairfax Media (although she sold her interest in the latter in 2015), and also expanded into agriculture, buying several cattle stations, divesting them within a decade.
Rinehart is Australia’s richest person. Her wealth reached around A$29 billion in 2012, at which point she overtook Christy Walton as the world’s richest woman and was included on the Forbes list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. Rinehart’s net worth dropped significantly over the following few years due to a slowdown in the Australian mining sector.
Forbes estimated her net worth in 2019 at US$14.8 billion, as published in the list of Australia’s 50 richest people. However, her wealth was rebuilt again during 2020 due to increased demand for Australian iron ore, so that by May 2023, her net worth as published in the 2023 Financial Review Rich List was estimated in excess of A$37 billion; while in March 2021, The Australian Business Review stated her wealth equalled A$36.28 billion.
As of September 2020, Forbes considered Rinehart one of the world’s ten richest women. Rinehart was Australia’s wealthiest person from 2011 to 2015, according to both Forbes and The Australian Financial Review, and again every year since 2020, according to The Australian Business Review and The Australian Financial Review.
Early life and family
Rinehart was born on 9 February 1954 at St John of God Subiaco Hospital in Perth, Western Australia. She is the only child of Hope Margaret Nicholas and Lang Hancock. Until age four, Rinehart lived with her parents at Nunyerry, 60 km (37 mi) north of Wittenoom.
Her family then moved to Mulga Downs Station in the Pilbara. Later, Rinehart boarded at St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls in Perth. She briefly studied economics at the University of Sydney before dropping out and working for her father, gaining an extensive knowledge of the Pilbara iron-ore industry.
Rinehart rebuilt the HPPL company to become one of the most successful private companies in Australia’s history. In 1973, at age 19, Rinehart met Englishman Greg Milton while both were working in Wittenoom. At this time, Milton changed his surname to an earlier family name, Hayward. Their children, John Langley and Bianca Hope, were born in 1976 and 1977, respectively. The couple separated in 1979 and divorced in 1981. In 1983, she married corporate lawyer and Arco executive Frank Rinehart in Las Vegas.
They had two children, Hope and Ginia, born in 1986 and 1987, respectively. Frank Rinehart received a scholarship to Harvard for his services in the then US Army Air Corps. He was top of Harvard College, and then top of Harvard Law School, while also studying engineering, and holding a full-time and two part-time jobs. Frank Rinehart died in 1990. Rinehart and her stepmother, Rose Porteous, were involved in a legal fight from 1992 over Hancock’s death and estate.
The dispute took 14 years to settle, with HPPL retaining the mining tenements that Porteous had alleged did not belong to the company. In 1999, the Western Australian state government approved a proposal to name a mountain range in honour of her family. Hancock Range is situated about 65 km (40 mi) north-west of the town of Newman at 23°00′23″S 119°12′31″E and commemorates the family’s contribution to the establishment of the pastoral and mining industry in the Pilbara region.
In 2003, at age 27, Rinehart’s son John changed his surname by deed poll from his birth name Hayward to Hancock, his maternal grandfather’s name. Since 2014, Rinehart has had a difficult relationship with her son, John, and was not present at his wedding to Gemma Ludgate. John’s sister, Bianca Hope Rinehart, who was once positioned to take over the family business, served as a director of Hancock Prospecting and HMHT Investments until 31 October 2011, when she was replaced by her half-sister, Ginia Rinehart. In 2013, Bianca married her partner, Sasha Serebryako, in Hawaii, but Rinehart did not attend the wedding.[28] Rinehart’s other daughter, Hope, married Ryan Welker, and they divorced while living in New York.
Rinehart attended both her younger daughters’ weddings.
MacKenzie Scott:
MacKenzie Scott (born April 7, 1970, San Francisco, California, U.S.) is an American billionaire, philanthropist, and novelist. According to Forbes magazine, in July 2024, she had a net worth of $37 billion, making her the 9th richest person in the world and the fourth richest woman in the United States. In 1994, she founded Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, with her then-husband, Jeff Bezos. As part of their 2019 divorce settlement, she received a 4 percent stake in the company, whose valuation topped $2 trillion in 2024.
After their divorce, she began using her middle name, Scott, as her surname. Scott made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in 2020 and was named the “world’s most powerful woman” by Forbes in 2021.
Early life and education
MacKenzie Scott Tuttle grew up in the San Francisco area, where she enjoyed a privileged childhood. Her father was a successful financial planner, and her mother stayed home with the couple’s three children.
The family had homes in the expensive Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco and in the exclusive enclave of Ross, north of the city. Tuttle’s love of writing began at an early age. She later recalled writing a 142-page novel at age six titled The Bookworm, which she described as “a chapter book about the adventures of a worm who loved to read.”Tuttle was sent to the Hotchkiss boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut, and her classmates later remembered her as humble and disciplined. During her last year at school, her family’s fortunes changed dramatically when her father declared bankruptcy.
She was able to complete her studies in three years instead of four and graduated in 1987. Awarded a scholarship, Tuttle continued her education by attending Princeton University. Her financial situation remained dire, however, and only a loan from a fellow student saved her from dropping out of college in her sophomore year.
Tuttle’s love of writing flourished at Princeton, where she studied under Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who described her as “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.” Tuttle also worked as a research assistant for Morrison, who was then writing her novel Jazz (1992).
Career, marriages, and writings
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1992, Tuttle moved to New York City, where she worked as a waitress and took an administrative assistant position with D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund company.
There she fell in love with the infectious laugh of a colleague: 30-year-old Jeff Bezos, a senior vice president of the company, charged with researching the business potential of the budding Internet. “It was love at first listen,” she later said. The two married in 1993. In July 1994, they left their jobs at D.E. Shaw and moved to the Seattle area, where they founded an online bookselling company called Cadabra. They had worked on the business plan for the new company during the cross-country drive to their new home. In the early days of the company, which the couple then operated out of their garage, MacKenzie Bezos played an integral role in the business, doing bookkeeping, writing checks, and overseeing freight contracts.
“She was clearly a voice in that room in those early years,”
According to Brad Stone, a frequent writer about Amazon and its origins. When Jeff Bezos’s lawyer suggested that the company’s name could be mistaken for “Cadaver,” the couple switched the name to Relentless before settling on Amazon. As the company grew, MacKenzie Bezos stepped back from the business to focus on her literary career and on the couple’s family, which included three sons and an adopted daughter.
In 2005, Bezos published her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, which traces the travails of a dam engineer and his family. The book received generally positive reviews—The New York Times called it a “quietly absorbing first novel”—and it earned a 2006 American Book Award. In 2013, Bezos published her second novel, Traps, a suspenseful tale about how the lives of four women intersect over four days. Despite the establishment of Amazon’s own publishing imprints, Bezos’s books were published with traditional publishing houses. According to BookScan, her novels have sold only a few thousand print copies.
By 2018, the Bezoses’ marriage was struggling. As Stone reported, the reserved and bookish MacKenzie Bezos and the extroverted Jeff Bezos had developed “diverging appetites for public attention,” especially after Amazon opened a Hollywood studio and began film production. The couple announced their decision to divorce with a joint post on Twitter on January 9, 2019. That evening, the National Enquirer released its first online story concerning the divorce—a detailed account of Jeff Bezos’s ongoing affair with entertainment reporter Lauren Sánchez, wife of the chairman of the Endeavor talent agency. The Bezoses’ combined net worth of $160 billion made for one of the largest divorce settlements in history.
Their divorce was widely reported on by financial journalists and gossip columnists alike. Jeff Bezos received 75 percent of their Amazon stock and all of their voting rights in the company, along with ownership of The Washington Post and the Blue Origin aerospace company. This left Scott with 25 percent of their Amazon stock, then valued at more than $38 billion. In March 2021, Scott married Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher at the school attended by Scott’s children. They divorced in January 2023.
Philanthropy:
Following her divorce from Jeff Bezos, Scott devoted most of her efforts to philanthropy. In May 2019, she signed the Giving Pledge, a charity campaign created by Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett in which the signatories pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to charity.
The pledge is not legally binding and has been signed by many billionaires, but not by Bezos. Scott’s philanthropy has targeted childhood development, racial equality, and higher education, funding HBCUs, Indigenous colleges, and Hispanic-oriented institutions.
In June 2020, Scott, along with Melinda Gates and others, launched the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, a philanthropy dedicated to promoting gender equality. Scott’s charitable giving in 2022 was highly diverse, aiding Habitat for Humanity, Planned Parenthood, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Girl Scouts, and various organizations in Kenya, India, Brazil, and Micronesia. By 2024, Scott had reportedly given more than $16 billion to some 2,000 nonprofit organizations.
Iris Fontbona:
Iris Balbina Fontbona González (born October 2, 1944) is a Chilean mining magnate, media proprietor, billionaire businesswoman, and the widow of Andrónico Luksic Abaroa, from whom she inherited Antofagasta PLC.
As of February 2025, Forbes estimated her net worth at US$25.8 billion. She is the wealthiest person in Chile, the third wealthiest in Latin America, and the ninth wealthiest woman worldwide in 2022, according to Forbes.
Fortune
Fontbona acquired her wealth following the death of her husband, Andrónico Luksic Abaroa, in 2005 from cancer. The bulk of her husband’s business went to their three sons, Guillermo, Jean Paul, and Andrónico. Jean Paul manages Antofagasta, the Luksic Group’s copper mining group and one of the largest mining companies in the world.
Business
Fontbona and her family control Antofagasta, the Santiago-based mining company. Through the publicly traded company Quiñenco, they control Banco de Chile, Madeco, a copper products manufacturer, the country’s largest brewer, CCU, and a shipping company, CSAV. CSAV is the world’s 16th largest shipping company as measured by TEUs.
In 2013, she controlled 65% of Antofagasta. Following the death of her husband, the business of her husband under her control, “Fontbona managed to make their family business grow and reach its new heights of success”.This included turning the business into the second biggest bank in Chile, the biggest brewer in the world, the manager of the largest copper mines in the world, and controlling the world’s largest shipping company. Another one of her businesses is a pair of luxury hotel chains and a luxury resort in Croatia.
One of her first major actions following her husband’s death was to acquire a 70% stake in the Chilean television station, Canal 13. Much of her power in the company appears to be indirect. Major business decisions impacting the company, largely run by her son, Andrónico Luksic Craig, need to be approved by Fontbona.
Philanthropy
In 2015, Fontbona donated a record CL$3.1 billion (approximately US$3.9 million) to the annual Chilean Telethon, which seeks to help children with physical disabilities. She appeared on television for a telethon, which also takes place before a live audience. In 2016, she donated CL$4.4 billion (approximately US$5.5 million), which assisted in setting a record for the charity event in terms of funds raised.
Background
Fontbona was born in 1942 and attended a Catholic high school. When she was 17, she met Andrónico Luksic Abaroa, who was 15 years her senior, and they married by the time she was 20. Luksic had five children by his first wife, Patricia Lederer, who died before he did.
Fontbona became the stepmother of Andrónico Luksic Craig when he was seven years old. Another of her sons was Guillermo Luksic, who died of lung cancer in 2013. The couple had three children of their own. Fontbona spends time in three primary residences, including Vitacura, Santiago, Chile, Belgravia in London, and Liechtenstein.
She is a devout Roman Catholic. She keeps a low profile but garners much media attention annually during the Chilean Telethon. She does not grant interviews.