From shipping magnates to tech pioneers, these remarkable women have built incredible fortunes through innovation and determination. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories behind the world's wealthiest self-made women, their groundbreaking businesses, and the industries they've revolutionized.
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00:00If I can make it, you can make it too.
00:03Welcome to Ms. Mojo,
00:04and today we're counting down our picks for the richest self-made women on the planet
00:09and diving into how they made their billions.
00:11Her role is decisive. She is a very strong character.
00:16Number 10. Linda Resnick.
00:18You might have some of her products in your kitchen right now.
00:21Maybe I can make a difference if I use my business acumen
00:25to do something for mankind.
00:28Resnick and her husband co-own The Wonderful Company,
00:31which is the parent company of Fiji Water, Wonderful Pistachios,
00:34Palm Wonderful, and several other brands.
00:37Combined, they give Resnick a net worth of about $6.3 billion.
00:41Resnick's background is in marketing,
00:43and her talents have been no small part of the company's success.
00:46It's really important that your brand has a story to tell, but it has to be a real story.
00:54In 2009, her flower brand, Teleflora,
00:57aired a Super Bowl ad that was voted one of the best of the year.
01:00And the Get Kraken campaign for Wonderful Pistachios
01:03landed a host of celebrities in the 2000s and 2010s.
01:07As Resnick herself likes to say,
01:09quote,
01:09"...it takes a nut to sell a nut."
01:11Don't look outside the box.
01:14The answer is within the box,
01:17and if you really study the problem, the answer will emerge.
01:21Number 9. Ty Lee.
01:23Talk about the American dream.
01:24Lee was born in Bangkok, grew up in South Korea, and immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager.
01:30In 1985, she became the first Korean woman to graduate from Harvard Business School.
01:35I had to save enough money to get enough tuition to study in a business school.
01:41So three years later, with $25,000 in savings,
01:46I went off, I came back to Massachusetts and went to Harvard Business School.
01:50In 1989, she and her then-husband bought a small, struggling software company.
01:55They renamed it SHI, and over the next several decades,
02:00they expanded it into a multi-billion-dollar international IT and cybersecurity operation.
02:05Because we weren't able to raise money, all of our growth over the last 29 years
02:11had to be organic, and that gives a company a certain amount of discipline.
02:17Lee and her husband divorced in 2002,
02:19but she's still co-owner, CEO, and president of the company.
02:23SHI is now the largest woman-owned business in the United States,
02:27and Lee boasts a personal net worth of around $7 billion.
02:31The largest technology solution providers in the world,
02:34and the largest woman and minority-owned business in the United States.
02:38We're SHI, all this and so much more.
02:41Number 8. Denise Coates.
02:43She built her fortune on a huge gamble, literally.
02:46Coates is the co-founder and joint CEO of Bet365, a British online gambling company.
02:52She holds 50% shares, thus taking half of it.
02:55To put that into context, the salary and dividends together would put her
02:58slightly ahead of Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
03:02Her family previously owned a couple of betting shops,
03:04but in the early days of the internet, Coates saw the potential in online betting.
03:09She founded Bet365 in 2000, and it quickly grew to become one of the biggest sports
03:14betting sites and virtual casinos in the world.
03:16Before she became Britain's richest woman,
03:19she could be found on the edge of a car park in Stoke,
03:21where she started the global betting brand in the early 2000s.
03:24She had seen the online betting opportunity
03:27and the massive growth for it long before others had.
03:30Today, it handles over $65 billion in bets every year,
03:35and Coates herself has a net worth of around $7.2 billion.
03:39However, she and the company have not been immune to criticism.
03:43Bet365 has been the subject of multiple scandals
03:46for refusing to pay out large winnings, among other issues.
03:49The top 1% of earners in the UK make about ÂŁ120,000 or more,
03:55so she's being paid 3,000 times more than the top 1%.
04:017. Tatyana Kim
04:03She founded a massively successful online store called Wildberries,
04:07which has been described as the Amazon of Russia.
04:10Tatyana Bakalchuk, the self-made billionaire who founded Wildberries,
04:14the $5.9 billion in sales retailer, comparable to Amazon in the US.
04:19But being the richest woman in the country still has its problems.
04:22In 2024, Kim divorced her husband and initiated a merger
04:27with a major Russian advertising company.
04:29Her ex didn't respond well to either of these events.
04:32Reportedly, he and his security team invaded Wildberries Moscow headquarters
04:37and opened fire, killing two security guards.
04:40This is a hostile takeover, or rather, an unsuccessful attempt.
04:44She added that she's appealed to law enforcement, quote,
04:47to take control of this situation.
04:49However, the hostile takeover attempt failed,
04:51and both the divorce and the merger were finalized.
04:54The size of Tatyana Kim's fortune has fluctuated with the business,
04:58spiking to $13 billion in 2021 and settling at $7.4 billion prior to the merger.
05:05Russia's richest woman effectively gave away a 35% stake in her company,
05:09worth an estimated $3.4 billion.
05:12Her net worth has dropped to $4.1 billion, from $7.9 billion.
05:18Number six, Judy Faulkner.
05:20Healthcare and IT are two of the hottest industries in America.
05:24I took probably the world's first class in computers and medicine taught by Dr. Walter Slack.
05:30And he asked me to work with him and his team.
05:32And I said, okay, and did a number of projects.
05:35And they brought me in and said they wanted me to keep,
05:38to develop a system that would keep track of patient clinical information over time.
05:43If you combine them into one business, you are going to make money.
05:47No one knows that better than Faulkner,
05:49who founded medical records software company Epic back in 1979.
05:54Today, Epic handles records for more than 250 million people around the world.
05:59What the company does really is basically like the backbone of a hospital.
06:05Plus, it has what might be the coolest corporate campus in America,
06:10full of buildings decorated in themes like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Harry Potter.
06:15Faulkner's current net worth is around $7.7 billion.
06:19However, she pours hundreds of millions of dollars into philanthropy.
06:23And in 2015, she signed the Giving Pledge,
06:26promising to eventually give away almost all of her fortune.
06:30So they sent them home and the software began to care for them,
06:35hooking up devices and sending the data back to the health systems.
06:41It was really a wonderful new way to help take care of patients, but at their home.
06:48Number five, Wang Laichun, also known as Grace Wang.
06:51She's one of the richest women in China, with a net worth of $8.6 billion.
07:04After working for electronics manufacturer Foxconn for 10 years,
07:08Wang left the company to start her own business with her brother.
07:11In 2004, they founded LuxShare Precision Industry,
07:15which makes computer cables and Apple AirPods, among other tech products.
07:19Ever wondered who's behind the assembly of your favorite Apple products?
07:22Meet LuxShare Precision, a company that's making a big impression
07:25on the tech industry and its CEO, Grace Wang.
07:28With over $32 billion in revenue and more than 200,000 employees,
07:33LuxShare has been hugely successful.
07:35It turned Wang into one of the youngest female
07:38self-made billionaires in the world at just 46 years old.
07:49Number four, Zhang Huizhen.
07:53From middle school chemistry teacher to pharmaceuticals billionaire,
07:56she became the wealthiest self-made woman in Asia when her company went public in 2019.
08:01She founded Henso Pharmaceutical in 1995,
08:05which produces cancer treatments, antibiotics, and a range of other drugs.
08:09The business' value spiked again when it began developing COVID treatments in 2020.
08:14Zhang's husband runs a different billion-dollar drug maker,
08:17but currently, her net worth of $10.9 billion
08:20is just slightly more than his fortune of $9.3 billion.
08:24Zhang's daughter, Sun Yuan, is the executive director of Henso,
08:28meaning this family is basically royalty in the Chinese pharmaceuticals industry.
08:33Number three, Zhou Chunfei.
08:35Another billionaire who made her money in tech, Zhou grew up in poverty.
08:48She was the only one of her siblings who was able to attend high school,
08:54but she dropped out at age 16 to get a job in a factory.
08:57At 22, she founded a small company that made watch parts
09:01and later transitioned to producing cell phone screens.
09:09When the mobile phone industry began to boom in the early 2000s,
09:12Zhou started another company, Lens Technology, to respond to the demand.
09:17The timing could not have been better.
09:19Today, Lens Technology makes touchscreens for Apple,
09:22Samsung, Tesla, and other major brands, and Zhou boasts a net worth of $11.6 billion.
09:38Number two, Diane Hendricks.
09:40Currently the richest self-made woman in America,
09:43Hendricks built her fortune through a roofing company.
09:46You just start looking at the need, and over the course of
09:49five, ten years, we realized that there needed to be a distribution chain to be able to offer
09:56to the customer, us, the contractor, the selection of various manufacturing products
10:03across the nation.
10:04She and her husband Ken founded ABC Supply in 1982,
10:08and it's now the biggest distributor of roofing supplies, windows, gutters,
10:12and siding in the country.
10:14After Ken passed away in 2007, Diane began making acquisitions,
10:18scooping up a rival company in 2010 and a building materials distributor in 2016.
10:24We did it because we knew there was a need in the industry,
10:28but we also knew that we had to build the best company with the best people we could find,
10:34and we did.
10:35Since then, Hendricks' wealth has skyrocketed.
10:38Forbes estimated her fortune at $3.9 billion in 2017,
10:43and today, it's nearly $22 billion.
10:46Hendricks has also dabbled in other industries,
10:48working as an executive producer on a handful of movies and TV series,
10:52and serving as an economic advisor to Donald Trump in 2016.
10:57I've quadrupled the size of our companies,
11:00and to my surprise, I was recently just recognized
11:03as the most successful self-made woman in American history.
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11:23Number 1. Rafaella Aponte-Diamant
11:25She was born in Palestine and grew up in Switzerland,
11:28and she met her husband during a trip to Italy.
11:31He was a boat captain and she was a passenger,
11:33which is fitting since they would go on to make their fortune in shipping.
11:36Over the years, MSC grew into one of the largest shipping firms in the world.
11:41In 1988, they expanded into cruises with the acquisition of the liner Monterey.
11:46They bought their first ship in 1970 with a $200,000 loan.
11:50Today, their business, Mediterranean Shipping Company or MSC,
11:54is the biggest shipping line on the planet.
11:57They are the largest privately owned cruise line in the world.
12:00They are part of the larger Mediterranean Shipping Group,
12:03a leader in container shipping and logistics.
12:06The Apontes also run MSC Cruises,
12:08which is the world's largest privately owned cruise company.
12:12As 50% owner of MSC, Aponte-Diamant's fortune is estimated to be worth $36.8 billion.
12:19Despite not having a formal position in the MSC empire,
12:22Raffaella has played a key part in the company's growth, according to Dominique Denat,
12:27who loaned the Apontes the money to purchase their first ship in 1970.
12:30If you got rich, which industry would you make your fortune in? Let us know in the comments.
12:35The outlet gave an in-depth look at Tay's finances and road to billionaire status,
12:40even crediting her as one of the few recording artists
12:43to build a 10-figure fortune almost entirely from her music.
12:48Do you agree with our picks? Check out this other recent clip from MsMojo.
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