The Ohio mogul, who built up retail giants like Abercrombie & Fitch and The Limited, has become one of the biggest (and most unlikely) winners of the AI gold rush.
Five years ago, Ohio’s most revered entrepreneur, Les Wexner, stepped down as chairman of L Brands and soon began to sell off his stake in Victoria’s Secret’s parent company amid controversy over his close relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Many believed that Wexner, then age 82, would quietly retire to his 340 acre estate in New Albany, Ohio.
Instead, the fashion mogul has more than doubled his fortune thanks in large part to some savvy bets in a different industry: technology. Over just the past three months, the mogul’s net worth–which includes assets held in his children’s and wife Abigail’s names–has soared to $10.1 billion from $7.9 billion, according to Forbes’ estimates.
The biggest driver of this increase: a 4% stake in CoreWeave, one of the buzziest artificial intelligence companies around. On Monday, CoreWeave announced it is buying crypto miner Core Scientific in a roughly $9 billion all-stock deal. Coreweave’s market capitalization has almost tripled since its March IPO to nearly $73 billion today, and Wexner’s stake is now worth $2.8 billion.
Forbes previously reported on how Wexner scored his stake in CoreWeave, which was founded in Livingston, New Jersey in 2017. Thanks to a smart investment by Wexner’s money manager at the time, a trust established for the benefit of his four children – Sarah, Hannah, David and Harry – apparently invested $1 million in CoreWeave in 2019; it put in another $600,000 in the startup’s Series A funding round in 2021. Wexner’s CoreWeave shares were already worth $730 million when the company went public in March.
The eight-year-old CoreWeave helps companies build data centers and loans out cloud access to much-sought-after graphics processing units, or GPUs, which firms like Microsoft, IBM and Meta pay to use to build AI models. With no shortage of customers, the company recorded $982 million in revenue during the first quarter of this year, a 420% increase versus the same quarter last year. However, it’s yet to turn a profit and reported a net loss of $315 million during the same period.
Nonetheless, CoreWeave’s valuation continues to shoot up, minting three-comma fortunes for its largest shareholders though they can’t cash out until the IPO lock-up period ends in September. Its success has produced at least four new billionaires, including CoreWeave’s three cofounders: Michael Intrator (estimated net worth: $9.9 billion), Brian Venturo ($6.1 billion) and Brannin McBee ($4.5 billion). Early investor and board member Jack Cogen is also a new billionaire, worth an estimated $3.5 billion.
Forbes discovered the Wexner family’s stake in CoreWeave in a lawsuit filed by the wealth management firm Florence Capital Advisors in the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York in May 2024. In the lawsuit, Florence Capital Advisors claimed they were owed a nearly $7 million fee for advising Wexner’s family trust to invest in CoreWeave in its very early days. A representative for the trust responded in a counterclaim that accused the wealth manager of “fraudulent conduct” and “multiple breaches of fiduciary duty.” The case is still ongoing. A representative for Wexner did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment for this article while Florence Capital founder and CEO Greg Hersch declined to comment due to the ongoing litigation.
Wexner and his family, who are estimated to have pocketed more than $2 billion after-tax from selling their L Brands shares between 2020 and 2021, likely have other startup investments we don’t know about. Outside of their stake in CoreWeave, the Wexners own a New Albany-based real estate development firm with an estimated $950 million worth of land across Central Ohio, an estimated $1.4 billion art collection, a nearly 300-foot yacht, a Ferrari collection and a roughly $300 million portfolio of luxury homes around the world.
Wexner’s development firm, The New Albany Company, transformed the city of New Albany in the late 1980s and ’90s.
© 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP
Wexner may seem like a surprising pioneer in the fast-changing world of AI. However, he’s actually spent years preparing his home state of Ohio to be at the cutting edge of the tech revolution.
Wexner owns the New Albany Company, a powerful real estate development firm in Central Ohio that led the transformation of New Albany, which was still a small rural town in the early 1980s, into an economic powerhouse housing the manufacturing facilities for his many fashion brands and employing tens of thousands of people. “Because The Limited was here, Columbus was the distribution center,” explains Kevin Cox, an Ohio State University associate professor and author of “Boomtown Columbus,” a 2021 book about economic development in and around Ohio’s capital.
Since 2019, the New Albany Company has sold thousands of acres of land to tech giants like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google to build data centers in the area. These projects, often propped up by generous state or local tax breaks, have generated some controversy due to the lack of jobs they tend to create.
Wexner’s New Albany Company also played a crucial role in securing nearby Johnstown, Ohio as the location where Intel announced in January 2022 it would build a more than $28 billion semiconductor production facility intended to help bolster domestic production of crucial computer chips. Intel’s project, once slated to open this year, has stalled amid broader problems with the tech firm’s money-losing chip manufacturing business. The latest update from the company indicated it will end construction five years behind schedule and is expected to open in 2031.
Still, Wexner has continued to benefit from a flood of tech interest in New Albany and surrounding areas. In January, AI military juggernaut Anduril announced it is setting up a $1 billion “hyperscale” plant near Columbus where it plans to produce tens of thousands of weapons and autonomous systems each year.
In the past few months alone, Google, Meta and biotech firm Amgen have all announced expansions of their facilities in the area. Wexner’s firm is often the selling end of these massive land transactions. These big tech companies are paying top dollar for large swaths of land: Last month, Google paid $741,000 an acre for nearly 85 acres in New Albany’s Business Park.
Former President Joe Biden spoke at the groundbreaking of the Intel semiconductor manufacturing facility near New Albany, Ohio on September 9, 2022.
AFP via Getty Images
The New Albany Company is also currently in the process of its own expansion. According to Columbia Business First, a subsidiary of the development firm has spent the past two and a half years quietly amassing more than 1,200 acres of land in Marysville, a small rural city about 40 minutes drive from New Albany where it plans to build two massive business parks for industrial and innovation uses. Through his New Albany Company, Wexner still owns more than 3,200 acres across Central Ohio, worth an estimated $950 million.
During a May board meeting for the Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Wexner, who is the board’s chair, reportedly predicted “probably the largest AI investment in the world will happen in Columbus.”
“Columbus is the largest city in Ohio,” he said during the meeting, as reported by The Columbus Dispatch. “We don’t publicize that – and I know in the real estate business that I’m in, people are always shocked at how big we are and how fast we’ve grown.”
With additional reporting by Iain Martin.
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