These Are The Richest Women In American History
While the gender pay gap is unfortunately alive and well, with women earning less than men who do the same work, there's still no shortage of successful, entrepreneurial women across a variety of industries — from tech to entertainment.
Some of these women come from old money, while others made their own fortune — but in any event, every last one is fantastically rich. Let's have a look at some of the richest women in American history.
Theresia Gouw: $500 million
Gouw was born in Indonesia, with her family eventually settling in Buffalo, New York. She went on to Brown University, then earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
She got her professional start at consulting firm Bain & Company, software company Release Software, and then VC firm Accel Partners. Gouw then founded her own VC firm, Aspect Ventures, and quickly grew her net worth to half a billion dollars — thanks in part to a shrewd early investment in Facebook.
Oprah Winfrey: $3 billion
Oprah is maybe the most well-known name on this list, as the TV and entertainment megastar is rightly known as the "Queen of All Media." While her net worth has fallen slightly in recent years, Oprah is still comfortably wealthy, and remains an iconic pop culture force.
Now in her early 70s, she isn't as prominent a public figure as she once was, but her entertainment empire continues to make money.
Lisa Su: $1.1 billion
Lisa Su has risen through the ranks of the tech world over the past thirty years. The electrical engineer first started at Texas Instruments in the early '90s, then was hired on at IBM in 2000.
Su's reputation for technical innovation continued to grow, and she eventually joined the Santa Clara-based semiconductor giant AMD in 2012. Two years later, she was appointed president and CEO of the company. Today, her net worth is right around a billion dollars.
Eren Ozmen: $3.7 billion
Turkish-American businesswoman Eren Ozmen purchased the Sierra Nevada Corporation, a defense and electronics corporation, along with her husband in 1994. While Sierra Nevada had been around since 1963, it was under the Ozmens' stewardship that it truly flourished.
Thanks to a number of acquisitions, the company now has more than 3,000 employees spread across various countries. The Ozmens started a VC fund in 2017, and now work mostly as philanthropists.
Marissa Mayer: $970 million
Mayer got in on the ground floor at Google and was hired as the company's 20th employee. Her attention to detail earned her a prominent role at Google in its early days, and she eventually parlayed this into a position as president and CEO of Yahoo! in 2012.
Mayer's tenure at Yahoo! saw the company get purchased by Verizon for $4.48 billion in 2017. She tendered her resignation that same year and now runs a tech startup.
Meg Whitman: $3.4 billion
Today, Meg Whitman serves as the U.S. ambassador to Kenya and also made a splash with a failed campaign to run for governor of California. But before her political career, she was a key player in the early years of the dotcom boom.
She served as an executive with Disney, Dreamworks, Procter & Gamble and Hasbro in the '80s and '90s, then made the jump to eBay in 1998. She helped turn the auction site into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut and now has a personal net worth of more than three billion dollars.
Susan Wojcicki: $800 million
Wojcicki's early involvement in tech came from renting her garage out to Google's founders in 1998. The following year, she was hired as Google's first marketing manager. She noticed the success of streaming platform YouTube and suggested Google purchase it.
The $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube was, in hindsight, an absolute bargain. Under Wojcicki's leadership, the now Google-owned product thrived. After nine years at the helm of YouTube, Wojcicki resigned in 2023.
Peggy Cherng: $3.1 billion
Cherng was born in Myanmar and met her eventual husband, Andrew Cherng, while both were attending Baker University in Kansas in the late '60s. The couple got married, with Peggy working as an engineer, when they struck gold in the early '70s with the founding of the Panda Express restaurant chain.
After rapid expansion in the following decades, Panda Express was worth billions. The Cherngs don't franchise or publicly trade their restaurants, and today they're worth more than $3 billion.
Anastasia Soare: $790 million
The Romanian-born Soare moved to the United States in 1989 in her early 30s and found work at a beauty salon. She quickly made a name for herself as a talented makeup artist and beautician, working with various famous clients.
After founding the Anastasia Beverly Hills beauty brand and then selling stakes in the business, Soare found herself a very rich woman. Today, Anastasia Soare is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Elizabeth Uihlein: $3.7 billion
Elizabeth Uihlein and her husband Richard founded shipping supplies company Uline (named for the phonetic pronunciation of their last name) in 1980. They made the choice not to go public, and Uline is now one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
The Uihleins have diversified their holdings somewhat and are major political donors, but they still focus most of their business on Uline, which they own to this day.
Kit Crawford: $1 billion
Kit Crawford and her husband Gary Erickson started out with a humble dream — creating a tasty, nutritious energy bar. When they launched Clif Bar & Company in 1992, it was a simple venture, but quickly became one of the top brands on the market.
Erickson and Crawford sold the brand to Mondelez International for just shy of $3 billion in 2022, but are still heavily involved in the company as co-CEOs.
Sheryl Sandberg: $2.1 billion
Facebook was already a household name when businesswoman Sheryl Sandberg got on board in 2007, but there was one problem: The company couldn't find a way to be profitable. As chief operating officer, Sandberg was able to fix that, finding new revenue streams through advertising.
Because she owned 41 million shares in the newly-profitable company, Sandberg was able to cash out when she sold more than half of her shares. She's now mostly a philanthropist and has a net worth of $2.1 billion.
Beyoncé: $800 million
Queen Bey first entered the public eye as a member of R&B girl group Destiny's Child, and her career only continued to grow after she made a go of it as a solo artist.
Over the course of her career, Beyoncé has consistently been one of the most influential — and best-selling — female musical artists. She's sold over 200 million albums worldwide, and she owns a record 32 Grammy Awards.
Marian Ilitch: $4.6 billion
Marian Ilitch and her late husband Mike, both the children of Macedonian immigrants, founded Little Caesars Pizza in the Detroit area back in 1959. They expanded the pizza franchise through franchising, and built an empire that included ownership stakes in Detroit's pro sports teams.
An aggressive push to buy various casinos increased the Ilitch family's wealth. Mike Ilitch passed away in 2017, and today his widow Marian is worth more than $4 billion — making her one of the richest women in the world.
Sheila Johnson: $860 million
Sheila Johnson co-founded Black Entertainment Television, or BET, in 1980. In time, she became the world's first Black woman to be a billionaire. BET's successes through the '80s and '90s led to more investment opportunities for Johnson.
She's now an owner or partner in three DC-area sports franchises: The WNBA's Washington Mystics, NBA's Washington Wizards, and NHL's Washington Capitals. She also owns several resorts and golf courses around the world.
Gail Miller: $4.4 billion
Following the death of billionaire businessman Larry H. Miller in 2009, his widow Gail took on his significant portfolio. The Larry H. Miller Group of Companies includes dozens of car dealerships, a movie theater chain, and ownership stakes in the NBA's Utah Jazz.
In all, businesses owned under this portfolio employ over 11,000 people. Gail Miller continues to own a minority stake in the Utah Jazz, and is the richest person in the state of Utah.
Gwynne Shotwell: $900 million
Shotwell's background is in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics, and she started out her professional career in the aerospace industry. After more than a decade in this space, she joined SpaceX in 2002.
Shotwell oversaw many of SpaceX's early successes, and she's now the company's president and COO. As the boss of the world's biggest private space corporation, her personal net worth will likely climb over the billion-dollar mark in the years to come.
Johnelle Hunt: $4.2 billion
Arkansas native Johnelle Hunt is the widow of Johnnie Bryan Hunt, the founder of J.B. Hunt Transport Services. In the '80s, two decades after the company was founded, it was the 80th-largest trucking company in the country. Today, it's the biggest, employing more than 24,000 people.
Johnelle Hunt has maintained a relatively low profile for most of her life, but her family still has a prominent role in the business. Her son, Bryan Hunt, sits on the company's board of directors.
Tory Burch: $1 billion
After a a career in public relations and advertising, Tory Burch founded the aptly-named Tory Burch fashion brand in 2004. The brand made a big splash in Manhattan, and quickly grew, opening more than 370 stores worldwide.
Burch still runs the company, sitting as the Executive Chairman and Chief Creative Office of Tory Burch LLC. She's one of the most influential women in the fashion world, and has a net worth of around a billion dollars.
Lynda Resnick: $5.6 billion
Resnick and her husband Stewart have been involved in business ventures for decades, and they really struck it big when they founded Roll Global — now known as The Wonderful Company.
While the brand name might not be too familiar, its products — including POM Wonderful pomegranate drinks, Fiji Water, and various other food and wine brands — are carried at retailers around the world. The Resnicks are one of the richest couples in the United States.
Sara Blakely: $1.3 billion
Spanx isn't the cultural force it once was, but the lifestyle brand — anchored by its trademark foundation garments — is still worth significant money. The company's founder, Sara Blakely, has a personal net worth of over a billion dollars.
Blakely is truly a self-made success story, as she developed the concept for Spanx on her spare time while working as a door-to-door saleswoman. After investing her own money, she was able to make the company a massive success.
Judith Faulkner: $7.5 billion
Faulkner's impressive net worth of nearly eight billion dollars comes from the healthcare field. As the daughter of a pharmacist and a physician, she had an interest in the field from a young age, and she founded Epic Systems — a healthcare software company — in 1979.
The company had humble beginnings but quickly became big. Despite this, it has remained in private hands and has never acquired another company. In 2015, Faulkner committed to giving 99 percent of her assets to philanthropic ventures.
Taylor Swift: $1.3 billion
Given her enormous popularity and ability to sell out massive stadiums, it isn't particularly surprising that Taylor Swift is worth more than a billion dollars. According to Forbes, she's the first musician to become a billionaire "solely based on [her] songs and performances."
While T-Swift has focused almost entirely on music rather than business, she's also committed to using her wealth for philanthropic means. Her donations have helped causes from natural disasters to children's hospitals to arts initiatives.
Laurene Powell Jobs: $13.8 billion
Laureen Powell Jobs was an entrepreneur from a young age, starting a natural foods company and working as a trading strategist. But her wealth comes largely from her marriage to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in 2011.
She inherited 38.5 million shares of Apple Inc., along with a 7.3 percent stake in The Walt Disney Company. These assets make her an incredibly wealthy woman — by some estimates, the richest woman in the tech industry.
Weili Dai: $1.3 billion
Dai was an elite basketball player in her native China, but refocused her career on computer science after moving to the United States in the late '70s. She and her husband Sehat Sutardja founded semiconductor company Marvell Technology Group in 1995.
Under Dai's leadership, Marvell made a number of strategic acquisitions, growing into one of the most successful semiconductor companies worldwide. A hostile takeover saw the couple ousted from Marvell, but their net worth is still in the billions.
Christy Walton: $14.8 billion
Christy Walton was married to Walmart heir John T. Walton until he was killed in a 2005 plane crash. She inherited most of his $18.2 billion fortune, which grew to more than $41 billion by 2015. According to Forbes, she was the richest woman in the world for a few years.
Since then, she's divested a significant amount of her fortune — donating billions of dollars to charity — and is giving much of her inheritance to her son, Lukas Walton.
Kim Kardashian: $1.7 billion
Kim Kardashian's friendship with fellow rich person Paris Hilton made her a mainstream figure, but her reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians turned her into a cultural force.
Since then, Kim K's successful reality TV ventures and shrewd self-marketing have helped her net worth continue to grow. As an entrepreneur, her various companies have earned billions of dollars. Right now, she's worth more than a billion dollars — but this number will only go up.
Diane Hendricks: $20.9 billion
Former Playboy bunny Diane Hendricks married Ken Hendricks in 1975, and the two teamed up to work as business partners in the roofing and construction supplies industry. Thanks to a loan, they founded ABC Supply in 1982 and grew the company into a national success story.
Following her husband's death in 2007, Diane Hendricks assumed control of not just ABC Supply, but also the larger Hendricks Holding Company. She was ranked as Forbes' richest self-made woman in the U.S. in 2018.
Michelle Zatlyn: $1 billion
Zatlyn was born in Canada in 1979 and moved to Silicon Valley after graduating with an MBA from Harvard Business School. She parlayed an internship with Google into several successful entrepreneurial projects including employee rewards program Achievers and cybersecurity company Cloudflare.
Cloudflare became a massive success and Zatlyn, as the company's co-founder and COO, deserves much of the credit. She's been consistently ranked as one of the richest self-made women, and most influential young women, in the tech world.
Abigail Johnson: $29.3 billion
Johnson's grandfather Edward C. Johnson II founded Fidelity Investments in the 1940s, and she joined the company after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1988. She rose through the company ranks and was named CEO in 2014.
Under her tutelage, the investment firm has continued to grow, with an incredible $4.9 trillion in assets under management and $12.6 trillion in assets under administration. Abigail Johnson's personal net worth is in the tens of billions of dollars.
Rihanna: $1.4 billion
Robyn Rihanna Fenty grew up in humble circumstances in Barbados and became a well-known musician before her 20th birthday. While her musical career would have made her rich, it's Rihanna's business investments that have made her a billionaire.
Rihanna's brands — including Fenty and Fenty Beauty — have become big players in the luxury segment, and her investment in the music streaming service Tidal has added to her net worth. She's now worth north of a billion dollars.
Miriam Adelson: $30 billion
Miriam Adelson worked as a medical officer and physician in Israel in her early years, and eventually found her way to New York in the '80s. She married Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson in 1991.
Miriam and Sheldon Adelson grew their net worth through investments on the Vegas strip and at the time of Sheldon's death, the couple was worth more than $20 billion. Miriam Adelson is now one of the richest women in the world.
Safra Catz: $1.9 billion
Safra Catz got her professional start as a banker at investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in the late '90s and later entered the tech world as a senior vice president at Oracle in 1999.
In her time with Oracle, Catz has seen the company make several significant acquisitions and establish itself as one of the biggest players in the tech field. She's now the company's CEO, and has a personal wealth of $1.9 billion.
Mackenzie Scott: $33.8 billion
Mackenzie Scott is a novelist, which is a career that doesn't typically make one a billionaire. That said, she's also the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which is something that definitely makes someone a billionaire.
Scott married Bezos in 1993, and Amazon was founded shortly after. She was instrumental in the early direction of the company. After the couple got divorced in 2019, Scott was left with more than $35 billion in Amazon stock.
Elaine Wynn: $2.1 billion
Wynn is the co-founder — along with ex-husband Steve Wynn — of Mirage Resorts and Wynn Resorts, two of the most successful corporations in Las Vegas. They've created much of the Vegas Strip in their own image after making their first investments in 1976.
The couple was divorced in 1986, then remarried in 1991, then divorced once more in 2010. Today, Elaine Wynn has mostly stepped away from the business side of things to focus on art collecting.
Jacqueline Mars: $38 billion
Jacqueline Mars is a the daughter of Forrest Mars, Sr., who was himself the son of Frank C. Mars, the founder of the Mars candy brand. As an heiress to the Mars fortune, Jacqueline Mars is worth a staggering $38 billion.
While she worked at Mars between 1982 and 2001, she's been retired from the family business for more than two decades. She sits on several boards for charitable causes.
Jayshree Ullal: $3.8 billion
Ullal was born in London and grew up in New Delhi, first moving to the United States to attend San Francisco State University and then Santa Clara University.
An electrical engineer by trade, Ullal worked for several semiconductor companies, overseeing various mergers and acquisitions. Following a stint at Cisco, Ullal was named CEO and president of cloud networking company Arista Network. Today, she's regarded as one of the top businesswomen in the United States.
Alice Walton: $84.4 billion
Alice Walton's father, Sam, founded Walmart in 1962. She worked as an economist and equity analyst for several banks, and her wealth comes not from day-to-day involvement with Walmart, but from billions of dollars of Walmart shares.
Like many other billionaires, Alice Walton's big passion is art. She's also donated significant money to political and charitable causes. Now in her 70s, she's one of the richest women in the world.
Doris Fisher: $1.5 billion
Fisher and her husband Donald Fisher founded The Gap clothing stores in San Francisco in 1969. Within four years, the store had 25 locations on both coasts, and it quickly attracted a following for its fashion-forward private label clothing.
Donald Fisher passed away in 2009, leaving his fortune to his wife, along with their three sons. Doris Fisher is now in her 90s and isn't actively involved in the company's day-to-day business.
Julia Koch: $65.6 billion
Julia Flesher was born in Iowa and went to school at the University of Central Arkansas before moving to New York to pursue a modeling career. It was in New York that she hit it off with billionaire businessman David Koch, and the couple tied the knot in 1996.
After David's death in 2009, Julia Koch became a wealthy woman indeed. With a net worth north of $60 billion, she's consistently in the running for richest woman in the world.
Kylie Jenner: $710 million
Like her half-sister Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner has built an impressive net worth that stems from Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Her financial heft comes not just from reality TV, but also several business ventures — including Kylie Cosmetics and Kendall & Kylie.
Jenner — who isn't even 30 years old — is a force to be reckoned with in the influencer space, as she's one of the most-followed people on Instagram.
Dolly Parton: $650 million
The country icon's decades-long career shows no signs of slowing down, even though she's now in her late 70s. She'd likely be fantastically wealthy based solely on album sales, but she's also been an active entrepreneur throughout her career.
Parton founded The Dollywood Company, which runs the Dollywood theme park near her home of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Investments as a producer in the TV and film industry have also grown her net worth.
Janice Bryant Howroyd: $675 million
Howroyd Bryant started out as a secretary at Billboard magazine and went on to found a small personnel company, known as the ActOne Group. While the company got a slow start, it's now worth over a billion dollars, with Howroyd Bryant herself worth hundreds of millions.
The ActOne Group is also notable for being the biggest privately-held, minority-woman-owned personnel company to be founded in the United States. In the years since its founding, Howroyd Bryant has received several presidential appointments.
Martine Rothblatt: $820 million
Rothblatt earned degrees in the legal field early in her career, but she soon pivoted into a wholly different field: Satellite communications. She placed her focus on international broadcast satellites in the '70s and became very wealthy as a result.
Not content to rest on her laurels, Rothblatt then moved to different fields, including medical innovation, aviation, and sustainable building. Today, she has a net worth approaching a billion dollars.
Madonna: $850 million
It's been a long time since Madonna's heyday in the '80s and early '90s, but the Queen of Pop is still one of the biggest names in music, and a top draw whenever she goes on tour.
Like Dolly Parton, Madonna has supplemented her musical income with a number of business ventures. Most notably, she started Maverick Records, which made her one of the first women to establish an entertainment company.
Jamie Kern Lima: $650 million
Jamie Kern Lima worked her way through school by working as a waitress and grocery bagger, eventually earning a degree in business administration. She also became a public figure after winning the Baywatch College Search in 1999.
It was in 2008 that Kern Lima co-founded IT Cosmetics, a company that creates products for people with skin conditions like rosacea and hyperpigmentation. Within a decade, the company was pulling in hundreds of millions in profits.
Caryn Seidman-Becker: $360 million
Caryn Seidman-Becker made her fortune as the co-founder of Clear Secure, a company that leads the way in the burgeoning field of identification technology — the kind of tech that's used in airports and stadiums.
When she took the company public in 2021, it received a $4 billion valuation. In the years that followed, she helped grow the company even further. She now sits on Home Depot's board of directors.
Donna Karan: $570 million
If you've ever wondered what the 'DK' in DKNY stands for, the answer is Donna Karan. From an early age, the New York native showed a keen eye for fashion and worked her way up the ladder at the Anne Klein fashion label.
After founding DKNY in 1984, Karan became a very rich woman. She continued to work as a designer until the early 2000s, but has largely left the company to its own devices ever since.
Whitney Wolfe Herd: $510 million
Whitney Wolfe Herd made history in 2021 when she took her company — the online dating platford Bumble — public, which made her the youngest woman to do so in U.S. history.
Wolfe Herd founded not just Bumble, but also co-founded another incredibly successful dating app in Tinder. She's been ranked by Forbes as one of America's richest self-made women, and also one of the richest women under 40.
Gloria Estefan: $500 million
The Cuban-born Estefan built a wildly successful pop music career, and has been honored by VH1 and Billboard as one of the top recording artists in history. In addition to her music career, Estefan — along with her husband Emilio — has invested in various ventures.
The Estefans own a number of restaurants throughout Florida, and Gloria Estefan has also found success through her role on the board of directors at Univision Communications.
