The Waltons Are Getting Richer
Walmart is facing pressure from struggling lower-income shoppers while gas prices climb, yet the family that owns nearly half the company has never been wealthier. Here is how the Waltons are faring as the retailer they inherited navigates turbulent ground.
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Among the 15 richest billionaires on the Bloomberg Billionaires list, almost everyone made their money as a tech company founder or CEO. The tech label does not apply to Warren Buffett. The founder part does. Only one group on the list simply got lucky. This is the Walton family, who are only on the list because their patriarch, Sam Walton, founded Walmart (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction), the second-largest retailer in America, and also the second-largest among all companies based on revenue (Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is ahead in both cases. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, has a net worth of $272 billion, which puts him in fourth place on the list).
The Waltons are also very rich. The richest are his children. Jim Walton has a net worth of $137 billion, which is up $430 million this year. Rob Walton has a net worth of $134 billion, up $23 million over the same period. Daughter Alice Walton has a net worth of $133 billion, up $42 million.
Walmart had a very good year until it didn’t. It handily outperformed the S&P through late May. Then, it became clear that the low end of the retail market was struggling, based on customer incomes. Walmart was not alone in the discovery: McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD) made a similar observation in its most recent earnings report.
Walmart revenue in the most recent quarter was healthy, but it masked trouble in the US. Total revenue rose 5.9% to $187.9 billion. Net income dropped 8.7% to $6.5 billion. However, US comparable store sales rose only 2.6%. A few weeks earlier, Walmart CEO John Furner said, “And then we’ve seen some more signs of stress at the lower income levels.” He blamed rising gas prices for most of it. Since that statement, gas prices have risen even further.
The Walton family owns about 49% of Walmart’s shares. Walmart has a market cap of $855 billion. Among Sam Walton’s children, gas prices aren’t an issue.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
