From bank fraud to soup: How Arizona’s 12 Billionaires really made their fortunes
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
Love it or hate it, Arizona is full of transplants who moved here for economic opportunity. Take a walk around Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Gilbert, Surprise, and you will see a multitude of successful businesses forming new centers and wealthy neighborhoods creeping up the mountain views.
When I first moved here for a dream writing opportunity, I was warned that Maricopa County was full of people who weren’t the most educated, but were instead extremely lucky when it came to business success. After living here for years and educating some of those business owners’ youth, I find this statement to only be half true; Arizona offers a special kind of beauty, diversity, education, and melting pot that primes the right businesses for success.
Below is a list of 12 men who understand this and have used this special priming to reach billionaire status, or as Silicon Valley calls it, become a part of the Three Comma Club.
While it has become a running social media joke that the wealthy elite are only successful because they get up at 5 a.m., take cold showers, and oh, yeah, happen to have wealthy CEO fathers, that couldn’t be farther from the truth for this list.
Family feuds, murder accusations, probation, multiple Vietnam GI bills, immigrant parents, the dawn of the internet, and Warren Buffet summarize only a portion of the trials and opportunities the businessmen on this list confronted. Ok, fine, there are a couple of heirs on this list, too, but for the most part, there is a ring of hard work and seizing opportunity that makes the dream of striking it big that much more accessible to regular people like you and me.
Read below to learn about where these billionaires come from and how they reached club status.
Arturo “Arte” Moreno
Residence: Phoenix
Net Worth: $4.86 billion
Arturo Arte Moreno, Tucson native and Phoenix local, is a true self-made billionaire. His parents immigrated to Tucson from Mexico and his Dad ran a printing press for Tucson’s first Spanish newspaper. While entrepreneurship is a lucrative business, it is important to note that Arte was the eldest of 11 siblings and grew up sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with the 13-member family. Finances were stretched thin.
After graduating high school, Arte was drafted into the Vietnam War and served for 2 years. Using his GI bill, he attended the University of Arizona and developed a passion for marketing and business. Upon graduating, he landed a job with an outdoor advertising firm and after a few years of learning the business, he partnered with its owner (his then-boss) to launch Outdoor Systems, a billboard advertising company.
Using his business degree, Arte took Outdoor Systems public in 1996, and two years later, the business was sold to Infinity Broadcasting for $8 billion. Aware of the importance of diversification, Arte was invested in several other advertising firms at the time and continued to grow his wealth until he took a risk on a new passion; He bought the Los Angeles Angels from Disney in 2003 for $180 million. More than 20 years later, his team is valued at over $2 billion, but he refuses to sell it, stating that his heart remains with the Angels. He also owns commercial real estate throughout Phoenix.
Bob Parsons
Residence: Scottsdale
Net Worth: $3.61 billion
Bob Parsons grew up in inner-city Baltimore, poor as a church mouse. He struggled greatly in school, flunking fifth grade and nearly flunking his Senior year of high school. When he received the Vietnam draft letter to join the Marines, he showed his teachers and they reluctantly passed him. He was sent to Vietnam at the height of the war, and he stepped up to serve. He received four medals during his tour, including the Purple Heart and the Combat Action Ribbon. Upon returning, he used his GI bill to get his degree in accounting from the University of Baltimore.
An honorable man with more purpose after the war, he realized the importance of education and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in accounting. He worked as a CPA until 1984, when he launched his own software company, Parsons Technology. A decade later, he sold Parsons Technology to Intuit for $64 million.
Tasting success early on in the dawn of the internet, Parsons quickly formulated his best-known internet venture, GoDaddy. Founded in 1997, GoDaddy quickly found great success through its memorable and risque advertisements. By 2011, his company was valued at over a billion dollars, at which point he sold the majority of his shares. While he stepped away from the GoDaddy board in 2018, he has since launched YAM Worldwide, Inc., an umbrella company that runs nearly 10 companies in Scottsdale, Arizona. Another example of utilizing diversity to accumulate wealth.
Unlike some of the other billionaires, Parsons doesn’t shy away from telling his story, and he has his own factual web page that tells the highs and lows of his life.
Bennett Dorrance
Residence: Paradise Valley
Net Worth: $2 billion
At first glance, Bennett Dorrance’s story seems pretty cliche for a billionaire: Born to one of the wealthiest families in America, Bennett is an heir to Campbell Soup (Mmm Mmm Good). However, passionate about horses from a long-time love of equestrian pursuits, Bennett Dorrance got his degree in animal sciences and married his wife a year before graduation. He has remained married to the same women for over 50 years, offers scholarships to three of the public universities in Arizona (including his Alma Mater University of Arizona), and actively participates in environmental preservation — likely a result of his degree.
His wealth is partially from his wise real estate investments, with a notable portfolio including many commercial properties and residential projects, but his heir status only made this pursuit possible. He is the Grandson of John Dorrance, who invented the condensed version of Campbell soup in the 19th century. Bennett was heir to a 15% stake in the Campbell Soup Company.
While his fortune is mostly due to the luck of being born to one of the wealthiest families in America, Bennett’s philanthropic and real estate pursuits stand out as a marker of his drive.
Ernest Garcia II
Residence: Tempe
Net Worth: $6.6 billion
Ernest Garcia II was raised in Gallup, New Mexico, and was the son of a liquor store owner who was at one point the mayor of the town. Garcia II moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona which he initially dropped out of when he found a job as a stock broker. This first job led him down the path of real estate developer in Phoenix, where things began to get shady for him. In 1990, at 33, he pled guilty to bank fraud against Lincoln Savings and Loan, where he fraudulently took out a $30 million line of credit; He was convicted to three years of probation and had to file protections against personal bankruptcy.
His comeback happened when he acquired the failing rental car company Ugly Duckling for a bargain (under $1 million), merged it with a finance company, and turned it into a used car sales company for people with bad credit. Once he made Ugly Duckling public, he raised $170 million in the IPO. However, with further suspicious moves, he made this company private in the 2000s, and bought the shares for himself at $18 million, despite the company netting $600 million annually at the time. He rebranded it as DriveTime Automotive and now has an annual revenue of $2.5 billion.
His son, Ernest Garcia III, after graduating from Stanford University, joined DriveTime before creating a subsidiary that would eventually become its own company. Carvana is now deemed the “Amazon of cars”, and while Garcia II remains technically separate from Carvana to keep his son’s business clean of his convict past, he is the largest single shareholder in Carvana.
Stewart Horejsi
Residence: Paradise Valley
Net Worth: $3 billion
Stewart Horejsi was born during the Great Depression in 1937 in Salina, Kansas. During this time, however, his family was able to form and successfully run a welding business. After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1962, he returned home and took over the family welding business, focusing on successfully expanding it for greater wealth. In the 80’s Horejsi made some wise investments, investing roughly $94,000 of the business’ profits into Berkshire Hathaway, which then sold for an average of $312/share.
Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffet’s conglomerate that currently trades for just under $600,000 per share (yes, you read that right, as of February 2024, each share trades for more than half of a million dollars). Horejsi has since bought and sold several of his shares of Berkshire Hathaway and reinvested profits into his own mutual fund, but this wise move in the 80s put him not only in charge of his family’s finances but also into billionaire status.
Side note: Most sources mention Horejsi’s graduation from KU, but fail to mention what he majored in. After looking through yearbooks, alumni records, and the KU website, the only thing I can find on Horejsi is the family’s continuous donations and support of the volleyball program at the university; his name is not listed anywhere under the public graduation records. A mistake on the school’s end, or a peculiar fabrication?
Peter Sperling
Residence: Phoenix
Net Worth: $1.57 billion
Most people have heard of the University of Phoenix, an online school that offers education to adults who may need an alternative to traditional classrooms. In 1989, it became the first school to offer a full online collegiate program for bachelors and masters degrees. The University of Phoenix is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Apollo Education Group, founded by John Sterling.
Peter Sperling, son of John, is the heir of Apollo Education Group and can thank his billionaire status in large part to this fact. He received his BA in economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his MBA from none other than the University of Phoenix. He has served as chairman for both Apollo Group and CallWae, Inc. (now Fuze) and has since stepped down.
While his fortune has been largely due to lineage, he was also wise in his real estate acquisition. He has wisely bought homes in ritzier areas such as the Arcadia neighborhood in Phoenix, and in Montecito (next door to his Alma Mater of Santa Barbara) which has housed celebrity names like Oprah, the Ty Beanie Baby Mansion, Orlando Bloom, etc. Mansions and historical real estate have yielded him per-property profits in the millions in recent years.
Jerry Moyes
Residence: Glendale
Net Worth: $2.3 billion
Sports fans of Arizona may know the name of Moyes as he has been the minority owner of several local sports teams, including the Coyotes, Sting, Suns, and Diamondbacks. But Moyes’ most notable reach for the Three Commas Club was the founding of Swift Transportations, one of the largest trucking companies in the U.S.A.
Moyes’ Dad, Carl, was a truck driver from Utah and started his own trucking company with his wife, Betty. It reached moderate success, enough to send Jerry Moyes to study business at Weber State College in Ogden, UT. Once he graduated and returned home in 1966, the family left for Phoenix where Carl, Jerry, and brother Ronald founded Swift Transportations with one truck to haul steel and cotton between Arizona and California.
By the 1980s, Swift Transportations’ annual revenue was in the millions, and it currently grosses billions. With family effort comes success, and though he is the sole owner today, Jerry has since diversified his business ventures to include sports, steel, transportation, and aviation.
Jahm Najafi
Residence: Paradise Valley
Net Worth: $1.3 billion
This is one billionaire who prefers to keep a low profile and has very little to report in terms of early life. His upbringing and origin story remain a general mystery, though it is public knowledge that Jahm Najafi is a successful Iranian-American businessman. With a BA in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree in business economics from Harvard, it checks out that Najafi has been successful in the finance and equity world.
He started at a firm on Wall Street before moving on to serve at companies with his brother, and ultimately launched his own private equity firm, Najafi Companies. He also has served in the arts, participated in various philanthropic pursuits, and is the vice chairman of the Phoenix Suns and McLaren Racing. He currently resides in Paradise Valley with his wife and their three children.
Note for Black History Month: Najafi has a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, which has prompted a small step into the limelight in recent years. He has teamed up with “former NFL star Colin Kaepernick to form Mission Advancement, a special purpose acquisition company” that raises money to empower black youth.
Ken Kendrick
Residence: Paradise Valley
Net Worth: $1 billion
Diamondbacks fans know this name. Kendrick became a partial owner in ‘95 with the team’s inception and assumed the role of general managing partner in 2004 when Jerry Colangelo was ousted in a majority takeover. Shaping the Diamondbacks into what they are today is Kendrick’s most notable claim to fame.
Originally named Earl G. Kendrick, Jr., Ken Kendrick changed his name for better alliteration and recognition (and perhaps to celebrate his own autonomous achievements). He got his degree in business administration from the University of West Virginia and in 1965, started his career with IBM. This background allowed him to found a company, Datatel, which he still serves as chairman for. He also owns golf courses and has helped change the face of Phoenix through the company CityScape.
George Kurtz
Residence: Paradise Valley
Net Worth: $4.38 billion
New Jersey-born George Kurtz started his quest for the Three Comma Club after he graduated from Seton Hall University with a B.S. in accounting. He started working at Price Waterhouse as a CPA until 1993 when the company offered him the opportunity to become part of a new security team. Passionate about programming (he once claimed to have programmed video games in high school on his Commodore), he made it high in the company through this role, quickly. If it wasn’t for his young age of 27, he would have been made partner.
This barrier did not serve as a setback for Kurtz, though, who co-wrote Hacking Exposed in 1999, a book that found success in 30 languages. In the same year, he also launched his own company, Foundstone, the company that truly put him on the pathway to success. Focused on cyber security, Foundstone was bought in 2004, just five years after its inception, by McAfee. In a quick-witted move, Kurtz accepted the $86 million buyout and then went to work for McAfee as its CTO. Talk about opportunistic!
After numerous innovations made with McAfee, he once again co-launched his own security company in 2012, CrowdStrike. It is another innovative cybersecurity company that is AI-powered and the first of its kind. Kurtz is president, CEO, and co-founder for CrowdStrike and has created a CrowdStrike Racing team, which he also drives for.
The Shoen Brothers
Our next two billionaires have made their fortune from UHaul, but their story is wild and tragic at best. They belong to a 12-sibling family, though only three of these siblings have contact with each other to this day.
In 1945 Leonard Shoen and his first wife, Anna Mary, orchestrated a move across states, only to find it exceedingly difficult to find a travel trailer for rent. This ended up sparking the idea and ultimate creation of UHaul. Whether you’ve used them or not, every single one of us has seen these trailers and trucks on the freeway. After Anna Mary’s death from genetic heart issues, Leonard remarried several times, producing a total of 12 children, all of whom he gave shares of Uhaul to until he was left with a whopping 2%.
With quick success early on, the ’70s gas crisis led to a quick struggle within the company; UHaul relied heavily on deals they made with gas stations that could not keep up with the supply-demand and ultimately shut down themselves. As a result, Leonard began diversifying UHaul. As we learned in the above strategies, diversification tends to be a wise answer for wealth accumulation. However, Leonard’s idea of portfolio diversity included renting out more equipment that required gas, such as RV’s, Jet Skis, and other toys. Unfortunately, this tactic was anything but successful and led to millions of dollars lost and thousands of employees laid off.
In 1986, brothers Mark and E. Joe Shoen led a takeover to save the family company. Leonard at first agreed to the takeover with the condition that their other brother, Sam, who had been by his side at the time, remain as CEO. This agreement worked for a short time until Sam couldn’t stand Joe’s management style and left. Around this same time, Sam’s wife was found murdered in their Colorado ski home. Grief-stricken, Leonard insisted that this had to be at the orders of his sons, Mark and Joe. Leonard used UHaul money to fund the search for the murderer, and despite finding a killer who not only confessed but also matched the DNA, Leonard still insisted upon the guilt of his sons. Mark and Joe have always stood by their innocence and insisted that their Dad was mentally unwell.
By the early 90’s, Leonard no longer owned any of his shares, and his family was in what seemed to be never-ending litigation. Leonard’s mental issues ultimately got the best of him in 1999 when he committed suicide in Nevada. This untimely death didn’t do much to calm the family, though, who continued to see each other only in court until the legal feud finally ended in 2012. OK, now onto the two Shoen brothers who walked away billionaires:
Mark Shoen
Residence: Phoenix
Net Worth: $4.98 Bil
Mark helped rescue UHaul from failing when he dreamed up Amerco, the parent company to UHaul that ultimately acted as a protective barrier during a bankruptcy threat. Amerco bought a majority of the assets UHaul was forced to sell due to litigation, borrowed against these assets, and immediately remitted the cash back to the company. This kept UHaul afloat, although it seems not exactly on the up and up. Today Mark owns about one-fifth of the shares of Amerco, which is the main source of his billions.
E. Joe Shoen
Residence: Phoenix
Net Worth: $4.1 billion
E. Joe Shoen worked for UHaul off and on until he went to school; he has an MBA from Harvard and ultimately completed his law degree at Sandra O’Day School of Law, which led him to his own ventures and proved handy for him during the family feud. Interested in establishing his own business, Joe founded Space Age Auto Paint, which sells paint for cars, boats, airplanes, and you guessed it, UHaul trucks and trailers. Space Age Auto Paint is still in operation.
After taking control of UHaul with Mark, Joe created strategies for marketing, rebranding, and unheard-of customer service. One of Joe’s most remarkable ploys took place on a talk show where he gave the viewers his personal cell number, stating that his main concern is customer satisfaction and any UHaul customer is welcome to call him with concerns. Not only did he mean this and keep his cell number active, but he also made it a requirement that store managers do the same. He is the president, chairman, and CEO of Americo and his drive for customer service has never stopped; Every other week he visits various UHaul stores nationwide to perform his own quality control.
Fun Fact: Despite his club member status, he only stays in inexpensive hotel chains, such as La Quinta and Red Roof Inn, as that is what he did with his Dad and he finds it to be a good lesson to provide his own children with.
TLDR:
Every man on this list is educated. Education is not just for the degree itself, but for the connections that can be made. Every man found a job right out of college. Whether or not it coincides directly with the degree, these jobs usually set the foundation for the next move, or at least provide the necessary experience and financial resources. Every man also found a way to diversify their strategies: Whether through entrepreneurship, investments, or real estate, profits were put to work quickly. The general rule is that ownership is a fast-track way to higher bank balances: all of these men owned a company, stock shares, or property that they could then sell for huge profits.
Combine luck with opportunity, strategy, and diversification, and you end up with the condensed story of the Arizona Billionaires of 2024.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.
