By Grace Lieberman / NewsBreak Pinal County, AZ
Of the 2,668 billionaires named on Forbes’s 2022 World’s Billionaires list, 11 are from Arizona.
The officially published rankings came out on Tuesday, but the list is more volatile than one might think. In just days after its publication, some of these billionaires have fallen and risen by as many as 100 spots in their placements. This list is in the order of Tuesday’s rankings.
Ernest Garcia II
Ernest Garcia II took first among Arizona’s richest, again, and 246th in the world in 2022 with a net worth of $8.6 billion.
Garcia is founder and chairman of the used car dealership operator DriveTime Automotive Group. He also owns a majority stake in his son Ernest Garcia III’s business Carvana. Garcia III is also on the list.
Despite leading Arizona’s ranking and making the top 400 worldwide, Garcia’s fortune was nearly halved from last year’s $15.9 billion. Since the list’s publication, Forbes reports that Garcia has lost $213 million, dropping him to 270th on the list.
Garcia was born in New Mexico to Ernest Garcia I, a liquor store owner and the former mayor of Gallup. He attended the University of Arizona where he played on the golf team, but ultimately dropped out and became a stock broker.
In 1990, Garcia pleaded guilty to a bank fraud charge. Shortly after, he bought the bankrupt car rental franchise Ugly Duckling and shifted its business to selling and financing used cars for buyers with poor credit history.
In 1996, Ugly Duckling went public, but Garcia took the company private and renamed it DriveTime following six lawsuits that alleged Garcia abused his position for profit.
Mark Shoen
Phoenix businessman Mark Shoen took the 601st place worldwide, and second in Arizona in 2022. His $4.6 billion net worth rose by almost $1 billion from last year.
Shoen is joined by his brother Joe, U-Haul parent company Amerco president and 709th on the list. Mark owns 22% of Amerco.
Mark and Joe took control of the Phoenix-based moving equipment and storage rental company from their father Sam Shoen. Sam founded the company in 1945 with his wife Anna Mary Shoen, and in 1985, the brothers staged a coup against him over concerns of his competence.
The outsing was a culmination of years of fierce, and even sometimes violent, contention among Sam and his 12 children.
Joe Shoen
With a $3.9 billion fortune, Amerco president Joe Shoen is ranked the 709th richest worldwide and third in the state.
Shoen heads the $3.8 billion company and owns a 21% stake. Joe led the campaign to replace his father in the company and was backed by his brother Mark. Although Joe had a highly contentious relationship with his own father, Shoen’s two sons are both executives at Amerco.
The family business was pushed into dire straits by the infighting, but Forbes reported in 2016 that Shoen’s business strategy was able to keep U-Haul afloat. After the highly publicized feud, Shoen apparently stays away from the public eye, avoiding speaking to media as well as investors and analysts.
Arturo Moreno
Tucson-born businessman Arturo “Arte” Moreno’s $3.6 billion net worth makes him the fourth richest in Arizona and 822nd worldwide.
Moreno first amassed his wealth as president and CEO of the billboard advertising company Outdoor Systems. He took the company public in 1996 in a $37 million IPO before selling it to radio company Infinity Broadcasting in 1998 in an $8.7 billion deal.
Moreno still owns stakes in other billboard advertising companies, but now he’s known as the owner of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team.
Moreno originally attempted to buy controlling interest in the Diamondbacks. Although that didn’t work out, Moreno didn’t give up and eventually bought the Angels from Walt Disney Company for $180 million. When he closed the deal in 2003, Moreno became the first Mexican American to own an MLB team.
Bob Parsons
At $3.4 billion, Arizona’s fifth wealthiest billionaire, ranked 883rd by Forbes, is GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons.
Parsons, who grew his fortune by more than $1 billion from 2021, founded the web hosting service GoDaddy in 1997 after selling his software firm Parsons Technology to Intuit for $64 million three years prior.
After stepping down from GoDaddy in 2018, Parsons founded the golf equipment and apparel company PXG. He also owns the Scottsdale National Golf Club, multiple motorcycle dealerships, and 10 commercial real estate properties in Arizona.
Parsons comes from humble beginnings and said he nearly flunked out of high school. But after working a series of jobs and serving in the US Marine Corps, Parsons graduated magna cum laude from the University of Baltimore.
GoDaddy, and Parsons, gained notoriety in 2005 with a controversial Super Bowl ad that Fox refused to air in the second allotted time slot for being too racy.
Despite the boy’s club image portrayed by its early advertising schemes, GoDaddy seems to have a highly regarded workplace culture. Employee reviews give it an A+ rating on comparably.com, and in February it earned a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2022 Corporate Equality Index for the fourth year in a row.
George Kurtz
George Kurtz, CEO of the cloud-based cybersecurity CrowdStrike, was tied with Arizona’s Bennett Dorrance for 1,096th in the world and ninth in the state at a net worth of $2.8 billion.
But since publication, real time rankings report that Kurtz has shot up more than 100 places to 989th (and sixth in the state) after gaining $80 million to total $3.2 billion.
The other rankings are reported based on Tuesday’s numbers, but Kurtz's rise was too dramatic to ignore.
Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011 alongside chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch, who left the company in 2020 to start a non-profit. CrowdStrike was the firm hired by the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to investigate when some of the committee’s internal emails were leaked to the public.
Kurtz also participated in multiple high-profile investigations during his time as McAfee’s worldwide CTO and executive vice president. He worked on the Operation Aurora investigation into a series of cyber attacks against Google among other companies. Alongside his soon-to-be cofounder Alperovitch, he also led research on the Night Dragon and Shady RAT cyber attacks.
Kurtz decided to found CrowdStrike after he became frustrated with the pace of development at McAfee.
Ernest Garcia III
With a $3.1 billion net worth, Carvana CEO and cofounder Ernest Garcia III ranked 951st on the Forbes list, and seventh among Arizonans. Garcia’s fortune was also slashed from $7.6 billion in 2021.
Garcia started the used car ecommerce platform in 2012 as a subsidiary of his father’s company DriveTime. Carvana stands out from traditional used car sales companies by cutting out middlemen and rolling its cars out of vending machine-like facilities to be delivered to customers’ homes.
In 2017, Carvana went independent in a roughly $225 million initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Garcia II is Carvana’s largest shareholder.
A graduate of Stanford University, Garcia started his career as an associate at the investment bank Greenwich Capital before holding various positions at DriveTime until he founded Carvana. At 38, Garcia is the youngest among Arizona’s billionaires by a decade.
Stewart Horejsi
Coming in at 1,053rd overall and eighth in Arizona, the early investor in Berkshire Hathaway Stewart Horejsi reported a net worth of $2.9 billion.
Inspired by the book “Money Masters,” Horejsi started buying stock in Warren Buffett’s multinational conglomerate in 1980 when his family’s welding supply company was struggling. He purchased 40 Berkshire Hathaway shares as little as $265 apiece, for a total of $10,600 and kept investing from there.
Today, the company’s stocks go for more than $519,000 per share.
Horejsi also worked as manager for the investment company Boulder Growth & Income Fund from 2002, but it was announced in March that he would be stepping down on April 1.
Bennett Dorrance
Real estate developer and Campbell Soup heir Bennett Dorrance is Arizona’s ninth richest person, and 1,096th in the world with a $2.8 billion net worth.
The grandson of condensed soup inventor John Dorrance, Bennett owns a 15% stake in Campbell Soup Company and serves as an independent director on the company’s board. Dorrance is a founding partner of the real estate development firm DMB Associates.
In addition to his position at Campbell, Dorrance also serves on the boards of the genomics research firm TGen, information technology company Insight Enterprises, and the Nature Conservancy Arizona.
Dorrance is a licensed pilot and owns a private hangar in Scottsdale. He also established a scholarship alongside his wife Jacqualynn in 1999 that has funded over 150 first generation college students in Arizona.
Peter Sperling
Arizona’s tenth place spot went to Peter Sperling, son of University of Phoenix founder John Sperling. Peter is ranked 1,818th worldwide with a $1.6 billion fortune.
Sperling was chairman of University of Phoenix’s parent company Apollo Education Group from 1983 until 2017 when the company went private. He also co-founded the telecommunications company CallWave in 2009.
Sperling graduated with an economics degree from University of California Santa Barbara, and earned an MBA from University of Phoenix while serving on the board.
Sperling seems to be a strong proponent of renewable energy, donating $7.25 million to California’s Proposition 7 in 2008. The measure, which was ultimately defeated, would have required California utilities to procure half of their power from renewable resources by 2025.
Jerry Moyes
The 11th and final place on Arizona’s list is Jerry Moyes with a net worth of $1.4 billion and 2,076th place overall.
The Tolleson-based businessman is the founder, and former Chairman and CEO of Swift Transportation, one of the largest trucking companies in the US.
Moyes started the company with his father in 1966, and has since grown the company from one truck to almost 20,000 and around $4 billion in annual revenue before its merger with Knight Transportation in 2017. Moyes stepped down as chairman in 2016, but owns almost a quarter of the combined Knight-Swift Transportation.
In 2020, Moyes was named CEO of Central Freight Lines, but the company shut down a year later after failing to recover from severe debt and operations losses.
Before the team filed for bankruptcy and was sold to the NHL in 2009, Moyes co-owned the Phoenix Coyotes hockey team.
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