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Dick’s Sporting Goods is a 77-year-old company but it’s had one of the strongest runs of any American retailer since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Shares of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based sporting goods chain soared more than 850% over the past five years, hitting an all-time high of nearly $250 a share on inauguration day.
Dick’s’ strong financial performance propelled the net worth of Ed Stack, the son of Dick’s founder Richard “Dick” Stack and the company’s former longtime CEO, to over $5 billion earlier this year. While the stock has fallen amid Trump’s tariff wars, the strong performance in recent years has also propelled Stack’s ex-wife, Denise Prenosil, into the ranks of the World’s Billionaires for the first time; she is now worth an estimated $1 billion.
Prenosil, 65, married Stack in 1984, the same year he and his four siblings bought Dick’s from their father, who opened the first store in Binghamton, New York in 1948. There were just two locations at the time and the Stack siblings agreed to pay $1.25 million for the business over 20 years. Stack took over as CEO and ran it for nearly four decades, transforming the business into a $13 billion (2024 revenue) chain with more than 850 locations across the U.S. Stack’s siblings have not been involved in the business for decades and none of them own more than 5% of the company today; Stack remains its largest individual shareholder. (Read Forbes’ magazine profile of Stack from December 2024.)
Prenosil received 4 million Dick’s shares and 3.4 million Dick’s options after the pair divorced in 2006, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which reference a March 2009 agreement. (She first shows up in public filings in 2009). Forbes estimates that she exercised all her options and sold the resulting shares between 2010 and 2017, pocketing nearly $100 million (after tax). But Prenosil held onto all 4 million of her common shares – which are worth around $820 million today. Taking into account dividends and investment appreciation over time, Forbes estimates Prenosil has at least $280 million in assets outside of her Dick’s stock.
Prenosil is one of just a handful of people on the Forbes Billionaires List who obtained their wealth through divorce. Other more high-profile examples include Melinda French Gates, the ex-spouse of Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, who have become two of the country’s most generous philanthropists. French Gates and Scott are worth $30 billion and $28 billion, respectively. Another billionaire thanks to her ex is Sue Gross, who divorced PIMCO cofounder and billionaire Bill Gross in 2017 after 32 years of marriage. In her case, she walked away with roughly $1.3 billion and reportedly two of her ex-husband’s three cats.
Less is known of Prenosil, who appears to keep a low profile and did not respond to requests for comment. She and Stack had five children together before they separated. At least one of their children, Michael Stack, works for Dick’s Sporting Goods as vice president of strategy and corporate development.
According to Ed Stack’s 2019 Memoir, “It’s How We Play The Game,” Prenosil grew up in western Massachusetts and graduated magna cum laude from Boston College with a dual degree in accounting and marketing. “She was smart and had big plans: she was working at a drugstore, learning the business on the sales floor, but saw herself rising through the ranks into high-level retail and living in a penthouse apartment overlooking New York,” Stack wrote.
Prenosil could certainly afford that penthouse today, but it’s unclear if she ever bought one. The only property Forbes could find under her name: a $1 million, three-bedroom home in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, a tiny town with roughly 3,000 residents as of 2023 near the Ohio border.