After losing the title in 2022, this heiress is the country’s mostaffluent lady for the ninth time in 10 years.
By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff
For the ninth time in a years, Alice Walton–the just child of late Walmart creator Sam Walton–is the wealthiest female on this year’s Forbes 400 ranking of the mostaffluent individuals in America.
With consumers gathering to Walmart’s “Every Day Low Prices” to escape high inflation, the seller’s stock is up 41% consideringthat the 2023 Forbes 400, pressing the 74-year-old Walton’s internet worth to an approximated $89.2 billion, up from $66.5 billion. She is $15 billion richer than the second-richest female in the U.S., Julia Koch—who acquired 42% of independently held corporation Koch, Inc. (formerly recognized as Koch Industries) from her spouse David Koch (d. 2019), and who briefly took Walton’s title as America’s mostaffluent female in 2022.
Walton, who ranks No. 15 on The Forbes 400 general, is now within spitting range of endingupbeing the second-ever female centibillionaire. L’Oréal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, who is a person of France, signedupwith the $100 billion club in June however fell to around $88 billion on September 4, when Walton briefly exceeded her to endedupbeing the world’s wealthiest female for the veryfirst time giventhat May2022 (Bettencourt Meyers recovered the title on September 26, with an approximated $92.6 billion fortune.)
Despite selling more than $28 billion of Walmart stock over the past years—and providing away more than $11 billion of the merchant’s shares—Sam Walton’s beneficiaries still own almost 45% of the Bentonville, Arkansas-based leviathan, due to considerable stock buybacks that have avoided the household’s stake from being watereddown. Forbes approximates that three-quarters of the clan’s stock is split practically uniformly inbetween Alice Walton and her brotherorsisters Jim (No. 13 on this year’s list, worth an approximated $95.9 billion) and Rob Walton (No. 14, $94.3 billion). Most of the rest of the Walton household fortune belongs to the successors of their bro John Walton (d. 2005): his widow Christy Walton (No. 48, $16.4 billion) and their boy Lukas Walton (No. 25, $33.9 billion).
The youngest of Sam Walton’s 4 kids, Alice Walton was 12 years old when her dad opened the veryfirst Walmart shop in Rogers, Arkansas in1962 She worked briefly at the household seller, as a purchaser of kids’s clothing, after finishing from Trinity University in Texas in 1971, before taking a task in New Orleans as a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton. Walton returned to Bentonville throughout the 1980s to run financialinvestment operations at her household’s Arvest Bank, before introducing a financing and brokerage store of her own called Llama with $19.5 million of household cash. When Llama shut down in 1998, Walton moved back to Texas and moved her focus to curating art.
She chaired the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville for a years, before handing the reins to her nephew Tom Walton’s partner, Olivia Walton, in2021 Alice is credited with starting the museum, which sits on 120 acres and includes works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe, after recognizing there wasn’t anything like it within 300 miles of her household’s hometown. Nearly all of the $1.6 billion it expense to open the center in 2011 came from trusts in the names of her late sibling John Walton and mom Helen Walton (d. 2007).
Alice Walton hasactually ramped up her own philanthropy over the past years, nevertheless, putting more than $5.7 billion into 5 household charitable structures that