Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey posts a 50% boost in estimated wealth in this week’s OC’s Wealthiest special report, to $7.5 billion.
Part of that increase is down to the soaring valuation of Costa Mesa’s Anduril, now valued over $30 billion, as well as new ventures he’s backing like Erebor, an upstart crypto-focused bank reportedly valued at $2 billion.
Is a PC business the next money-maker for 32-year-old Luckey?
At the just concluded Reindustrialize Summit in Detroit, the No. 11 ranked Luckey suggested defense tech firm Anduril could start making personal computers in the U.S. He later asked on social media whether people would “buy a Made in America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?”
“I’ve looked into it very, very deeply,” he said. “I’ve had conversations with everyone you would need to have to do this. Both on the chip side, on the assembly side, the manufacturing side. I know exactly how to do it. What it would cost. How long it would take.”
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Among OC’s richest members, whose fortune derives from their holdings in public companies, Joe Kiani counts the biggest potential variance (see entry, page 54).
Masimo (Nasdaq: MASI) stated earlier this year that the company’s founder, who in 2024 departed the company after a contentious proxy fight, retains a 7.5% stake in the firm, currently valued around $630 million.
No. 41 ranked Kiani, as part of litigation related to his departure, claims in a regulatory filing he actually owns 13.2% of the Irvine device maker, now worth about $1.1 billion.
Our estimate for Kiani’s wealth this year is $1.44 billion, and factors in other assets.
Kiani is showing no signs of slowing down; this month he was named CEO of Santa Monica-based media company Like Minded Labs. One of the company’s other co-founders, Mark Kassen, also runs the video-based civic engagement platform A Starting Point with Kiani and actor Chris Evans, aka Marvel’s Captain America.
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In-N-Out Burger owner Lynsi Snyder-Ellingson counts the highest estimated valuation for any woman on the OC’s Wealthiest list, $7.2 billion.
She’s also not long for the list. That’s due to the burger chain’s upcoming HQ relocation from Irvine to Baldwin Park in the next five years or so. Snyder-Ellingson, the only grandchild of the chain’s founders, also announced plans to move her family to Tennessee.
Earlier this year, In-N-Out announced plans to open a new regional office in Franklin, Tennessee, to support expansion in the Southeast.
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Adding thousands of apartments in booming Southeast markets over the past decade was a winning bet for Igor Olenicoff. So was eschewing high-rises for single-story office buildings in the years leading up to the pandemic.
Reports of Olenicoff (see entry page 38) investing much of his liquid holdings in the stock of tech titans like Google, Microsoft and Facebook pre-pandemic also have played a part in our fast-rising valuation, now at $10 billion, for the Olen Properties founder.
“The Big Fellow Upstairs has been kind to me over the years,” he told the Business Journal.
OC’s Wealthiest rankings start on page 36.
