Who is Alice Walton, the new richest woman in the world?

It weighs $ 107.5 billion. To get an idea, this is equivalent to almost 117,000 gold ingots. 107.5 billion dollars is also more than the annual GDP of countries such as Slovakia, Croatia or Kenya. This pharaonic empire, Alice Walton owes it to Walmart, the largest world distribution group. The one created by his father Sam Walton in 1962. In September 2024, at the age of 74, the American thus dethroned the Frenchwoman Françoise Bettencourt Meyers and became the richest woman in the world. After Forbesshe today occupies 13th place in the world ranking of billionaires behind Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos, to name a few.

However, Alice Walton’s face is not known to the general public. To believe that the lights of the spotlight would put it almost. “She is the one that looks like me the most – an anti -conformist – but even more unpredictable than me,” said her father one day, as reported Forbes . A rare admission which speaks volumes about the one who, without ever running for a ruling role in the family empire, managed to draw a singular trajectory. Far from the tumult of business.

Passionate about

Born October 7, 1949 in Newport, Arkansas, Alice Louise Walton grew up in Bentonville surrounded by her three brothers Rob, Jim and John. A graduate in economics at the Trinity University of San Antonio, she begins with Walmart as a buyer for the “children” department, before branching towards finance. In 1988, she founded her own investment bank, Llama Company, which she run for ten years. But its true ambition is placed elsewhere.

She is only 10 years old when she offers herself a reproduction of Blue Nude de Picasso, bought for … 25 cents. Thus was born his thunderbolt for art. From then on, with her mother, she paints watercolors during walks in kind. Art becomes a passion. Then, from thread by needle, a vocation. She collects Homer, Hopper, O’Keeffe, Rothko, Wiley… and spends no less than $ 35 million in 2005 for Kindred Spirits (1849) by Asher Brown Durand. At the time, it was outcry and the press were unleashed: “Such a masterpiece taken from the gaze of the connoisseurs to disappear in the Ploucs of the Arkansas”, we read in the columns of Monde .

A museum and a ranch

But the collector does not care. In 2011, she offered America an unrivaled museum: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, erected in the woods of Arkansas on 120 hectares belonging to her family, work of the architect Moshe Safdie. Entrance is free. The goal? Make art accessible to all. The bet of a committed patron that will prolong in 2017 the Art Bridges Foundation, which crisscrosses the United States with itinerant exhibitions intended for sub-financed museums. So many projects that sometimes earn him compared to Abby Rockefeller (1874-1948), a daughter-in-law of the oil magnate, which notably co-founded the Museum of Modern Art, in new York, in 1929.

But art is not the only passion for the wealthy heiress, never married and without children. Her Texan Ranch of 1300 hectares in Millsap, where she raises cutting horses – experts in the sorting of cattle – is for a long time a refuge. There, she is recognized for her flair to detect exceptional foals. However, theater in 2015: the American ended up reselling the property to devote herself fully to art. Especially since the philanthropy of Alice Walton knows no break or limits.

Philanthropy and public health

Through her foundation, she supports artistic education, health, meals in school canteens but also the fight against food insecurity. His most ambitious project is however still to come: the opening, in 2025, of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. Backed at the Crystal Bridges museum, this school intends to train allopathic doctors according to an integrative approach to health. Doesn’t she say that “to succeed in this world, you must constantly reinvent yourself”. In any case, it is the embodied proof.

Even his political commitments escape preconceived ideas. Republican until 2012 – except when Hillary Clinton presented himself in 2008 and 2016 and he supported it via a donation of 353,400 dollars -, she then definitively branches off to Democrats. Alice Walton chooses her causes, not her camps. Always with flawless discretion.