Business

The Richest Woman In America 2024

October 1, 2024

After losing the title in 2022, this heiress is the nation’s wealthiest woman for the ninth time in ten years.

_By_{Matt Durot}_{, Forbes Staff}

For the ninth time in a decade, Alice Walton–the only daughter of late Walmart founder Sam Walton–is the richest woman on this year’s Forbes 400 ranking of the wealthiest people in America.

With shoppers flocking to Walmart’s “Every Day Low Prices” to escape high inflation, the retailer’s stock is up 41% since the 2023 Forbes 400, pushing the 74-year-old Walton’s net worth to an estimated $89.2 billion, up from $66.5 billion. She is $15 billion richer than the second-richest woman in the U.S., Julia Koch—who inherited 42% of privately held conglomerate Koch, Inc. (formerly known as Koch Industries) from her husband David Koch (d. 2019), and who briefly took Walton’s title as America’s wealthiest woman in 2022.

Walton, who ranks No. 15 on The Forbes 400 overall, is now within spitting distance of becoming the second-ever female centibillionaire. L’Oréal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, who is a citizen of France, joined the $100 billion club in June but fell to around $88 billion on September 4, when Walton briefly surpassed her to become the world’s richest woman for the first time since May 2022. (Bettencourt Meyers reclaimed the title on September 26, with an estimated $92.6 billion fortune.)

Despite selling more than $28 billion of Walmart stock over the past decade—and giving away more than $11 billion of the retailer’s shares—Sam Walton’s heirs still own nearly 45% of the Bentonville, Arkansas-based behemoth, due to significant stock buybacks that have prevented the family’s stake from being diluted. Forbes estimates that three-quarters of the clan’s stock is split almost evenly between Alice Walton and her siblings Jim (No. 13 on this year’s list, worth an estimated $95.9 billion) and Rob Walton (No. 14, $94.3 billion). Most of the rest of the Walton family fortune belongs to the heirs of their brother John Walton (d. 2005): his widow Christy Walton (No. 48, $16.4 billion) and their son Lukas Walton (No. 25, $33.9 billion).

The youngest of Sam Walton’s four children, Alice Walton was 12 years old when her father opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962. She worked briefly at the family retailer, as a buyer of children’s clothes, after graduating from Trinity University in Texas in 1971, before taking a job in New Orleans as a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton. Walton returned to Bentonville during the 1980s to run investment operations at her family’s Arvest Bank, before launching a lending and brokerage shop of her own called Llama with $19.5 million of family money. When Llama shut down in 1998, Walton moved back to Texas and shifted her focus to curating art.

She chaired the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville for a decade, before handing the reins to her nephew Tom Walton’s wife, Olivia Walton, in 2021. Alice is credited with founding the museum, which sits on 120 acres and features works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe, after realizing there wasn’t anything like it within 300 miles of her family’s hometown. Nearly all of the $1.6 billion it cost to open the facility in 2011 came from trusts in the names of her late brother John Walton and mother Helen Walton (d. 2007).

Alice Walton has ramped up her own philanthropy over the past decade, however, pouring more than $5.7 billion into five family charitable foundations that have doled out more than $1.1 billion of her funds to date. That includes an estimated $380 million gifted through the Walton Family Foundation (which her parents founded on Walmart’s 25th anniversary in 1987) to organizations focused on education reform, the environment and the region surrounding Bentonville. It also includes more than $375 million that Alice’s Art Bridges Foundation has spent acquiring and loaning out works of American art to more than 230 museums across the country—including the Art Institute of Chicago, the MoMA in New York City and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.—since its founding in 2016.

Walton is also seeking accreditation for a new Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville that will “enhance traditional medical education with the arts, humanities, and whole health principles.” If all goes according to plan, the school will enroll its inaugural class of four-year MD candidates in 2025.

“Over the past several years, I’ve founded new organizations focused on the arts as well as health and well-being,” Walton said in a press release announcing her retirement as chair of the Crystal Bridges museum in 2021. “I’d like to focus more fully on my board chair roles at these entities.”