Amancio Ortega Net Worth : $63.2 billion
About Amancio Ortega Gaona
Amancio Ortega is a businessman with a personal net worth of $68 billion in September 2018.
Ortega stepped down as chairman of Inditex, the $15.8 billion (sales) fashion firm, but retains 87% of his fortune from his stake in the publicly traded firm. The company, which operates under several brand names including Zara, Massimo Dutti and Stradivarius, has 5,000 stores in 77 countries.
Ortega also owns properties in Florida, Madrid, London and Lisbon, a horse-jumping circuit, a stake in a soccer league; and has interests in gas, tourism and banks. Railway worker’s son, he started as a gofer in a shirt store. With then-wife Rosalia Mera, also a billionaire, started making dressing gowns and lingerie in living room. Daughter Marta works for Inditex.
The youngest of four children, Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbás, León, Spain, to Antonio Ortega Rodríguez and Josefa Gaona Hernández from the province of Valladolid, and spent his childhood in León.
He left school and moved to A Coruña at the age of 14, due to the job of his father, a railway worker. Shortly after, he found a job as a shop hand for a local shirtmaker called Gala, which still sits on the same corner in downtown A Coruña, and learned to make clothes by hand.
In 1972, he founded Confecciones Goa to sell quilted bathrobes.
In 1975, he opened his first Zara store with his wife Rosalía Mera.
In 2009, Zara was part of the Inditex group (Industrias de Diseño Textil Sociedad Anónima), of which Ortega owned 59.29%, and aside from over 6,000 stores included the brands Zara, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Zara Home, Kiddy’s Class, Tempe, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Bershka and has more than 92,000 employees.
His public appearance in 2000, as part of the warm-up prior to his company’s initial public offering on the stock market in 2001, made headlines in the Spanish financial press. However, he has only ever granted interviews to three journalists.
In 2011, Ortega announced his imminent retirement from Inditex, parent company of the Zara chain, stating that he would ask Inditex vice-president and CEO Pablo Isla to take his place as head. In 2012 Ortega donated about €20 million to Caritas Internationalis, a Roman Catholic relief organisation.
He purchased the Torre Picasso skyscraper in Madrid. He also purchased the Epic Residences and Hotel in Miami, Florida.
As of 2016, he owned around 60% of Inditex, which is the holding company for Zara and related chains.
In July 2017, for its second edition of the AEF awards,the Spanish Association of Foundations awarded Amancio Ortega in the 2017 Philanthropic Initiative category.
Very private about his personal life, as of 2012 he had only given three interviews to journalists. He married Rosalia Mera in 1966, and divorced in 1986. Mera died in August 2013 at the age of 69. He married his second wife Flora in 2001. He has three children. As of 2017, he lived with his wife in La Coruna, Spain.
Ortega keeps a very low profile and is known for his preference for a simple lifestyle. Until 1999, no photograph of Ortega had ever been published. He refuses to wear a tie and typically prefers to wear a simple uniform of a blue blazer, white shirt, and gray trousers, none of which are Zara products.
