Forbes’ annual billionaires list has long been dominated by men. Fortunately, though, things are beginning to change. From the co-founder of Gap to Oprah Winfrey, these super-rich American female entrepreneurs have made their way to the top off their own backs through ventures that include pharmaceuticals, fast food, and media empires.
On International Women's Day, read on to see the top 15 self-made women in the USA today, according to Forbes' list of America's Richest Self-Made Women 2022 and real-time data. All dollar amounts in US dollars.
Alice Schwartz graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in biochemistry before launching Bio-Rad Laboratories in 1952 with her husband David. In its early days the company manufactured ion exchange resins, which are used in pharmaceutical manufacturing and lab research.
Schwartz was widowed in 2012 but remained on the Bio-Rad board of directors until April last year. She still owns an 11% stake in the company, which had revenues of $2.9 billion in 2021. The couple’s son Norman is chairman of the board and president and CEO of Bio-Rad.
Indian-American Jayshree Ullal is the president and CEO of computer networking company Arista Networks, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Her net worth has doubled since 2020, when she also joined the board of directors at cloud computing company Snowflake Inc. The firm recorded revenue of $2.3 billion the same year.
Previously an employee of Cisco, Ullal currently owns 5% of Arista's stock. The businesswoman is reportedly planning to give a portion of this away to her two daughters, as well as her niece and nephew.
Doris Fisher co-founded The Gap clothing brand in 1969 with her late husband Donald. The business came about because Donald had struggled to find jeans that fitted his tall frame. After raising $63,000 in funds, they opened their first store in San Francisco.
Fisher worked as the company’s merchandiser for more than 30 years, stepping down in 2003 but continuing to sit on the board until 2009. In 2020, Gap Inc operated more than 3,100 stores worldwide, according to Statista, including Banana Republic and Old Navy stores.
Fisher is also known for founding and donating more than $60 million to the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network of charter schools.
Arguably the most recognizable name on this list, Oprah Winfrey built her wealth off the back of an impressive television, business and media empire. The businesswoman is best known for her eponymous Oprah Winfrey Show, a daytime talk show that rose to success in the 1980s, becoming the highest-rated TV talk show in the US and earning a number of Emmy Awards.
Oprah is pictured here during her (in)famous interview with Harry and Meghan in 2021.
Oprah has also starred in films, launched her own magazine, and co-founded a women’s cable TV network. In 2018 she also signed a partnership deal with Apple to produce shows for its streaming service.
Oprah's philanthropic donations go into the hundreds of millions, including more than $100 million for the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa and $10 million donated to COVID-19 relief efforts in April 2020.
Worth $2.5 billion, Eren Ozmen is the chair, president and majority owner of the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), a private aerospace and defense company that she and her husband Fatih acquired in 1994. The couple grew the company from a business with just 20 employees to a global corporation, which has since been recognized as the Top Woman-Owned US Aerospace & Defense Company.
In 2021, SNC created a new spin-off company, Sierra Space, to streamline its commercial space capabilities. Sierra Space raised $1.4 billion at a $4.5 billion valuation in November and hopes to launch its first flight later this year.
Ozmen is pictured here at the 15th Annual Living Legends Of Aviation Awards in 2018.
Peggy Cherng is the co-founder, co-chair and co-CEO of fast-food chain Panda Express. She worked as an engineer before opening the first Panda Express restaurant in Los Angeles in 1982 along with her husband Andrew (pictured right).
By 2020 the chain had more than 2,000 stores and was making $3.8 billion in yearly revenue.
Cherng is credited with developing the technology that enabled the restaurant to track its inventory and re-order ingredients, unusual practices for American-Chinese restaurants at the time. This efficiency helped the chain expand to its first 97 restaurants within 10 years.
Tech mogul Meg Whitman is best known for being the CEO of eBay and later Hewlett-Packard. She currently sits on the boards for Procter & Gamble and Dropbox, but is also heavily involved in the world of politics. In 2021, President Biden nominated Whitman for the position of US ambassador to Kenya, a role she now holds.
During her time at eBay the online marketplace's revenue skyrocketed from $5.7 million in 1998 to a whopping $8 billion in 2008. Whitman also oversaw big changes at Hewlett-Packard, which was famously broken up into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise under her leadership.
Rather less successfully, Whitman was briefly the CEO of short-form video platform Quibi, which launched in April 2020 but shut down just seven months later.
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Gail Miller and late husband Larry built up a hugely successful car sales empire, which started with just one Toyota dealership bought in 1979. More than 40 years later, Larry H. Miller Company has a portfolio of companies across the health care, real estate, and insurance sectors.
Gail is currently the owner and immediate past chair of the corporation.
The Millers were also big sports fans and bought the Utah Jazz NBA team in 1986 for $22 million.
In October 2021 the family agreed to sell the basketball team to Qualtrics CEO and fellow billionaire Ryan Smith for $1.66 billion. Miller is currently the richest person in the state of Utah.
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Thai Lee has been the CEO and president of IT provider SHI International since 1989. Lee was born in Bangkok and grew up in South Korea before moving to the US for high school. She studied biology and economics at Amherst College in Massachusetts, followed by an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Under Lee’s management SHI International has grown from a services reseller worth $1 million into a company that supplies some of the biggest global tech brands, including Adobe, Apple, Dell, HP, and Microsoft. Today the company has annual sales of $12.3 billion.
Marian Ilitch and her late husband Mike co-founded Little Caesars Pizza in Detroit in 1959. Both first-generation Americans born to Macedonian immigrants, they stayed close to their Detroit roots by buying the Detroit Tigers baseball team and Detroit Red Wings ice hockey team.
Following Mike's death in 2017, Marian Ilitch has been the sole owner of Little Caesars via her holdings company Ilitch Holdings. According to data from 2021, Little Caesars was the third-largest pizza brand in the US, with more than $4.5 billion in sales every year.
Ilitch also owns Detroit's MotorCity Casino and is helping to build a local sports and entertainment district in the city, which will come complete with pizza-shaped windows.
Businesswoman Johnelle Hunt earned her fortune through co-founding and running a successful transportation company J.B. Hunt Transport Services together with her late husband, the eponymous J.B. The couple started out running a rice hull packaging company in Arkansas in the 1960s, branching out into the transportation industry in 1969 with a fleet of just five trucks and seven trailers.
Hunt served on the company board until her retirement in 2008 and she's still the largest individual shareholder with a 17% stake in the multibillion-dollar business.
In December 2020 Hunt donated $5 million to the J.B. and Johnelle Hunt Family Ozark Highlands Center, a wildlife facility that promotes enjoyment of the natural world.
Lynda Resnick is the marketing mogul behind snack and drink conglomerate Wonderful Company, which she started with husband Stewart in 1979 after purchasing the flower delivery service Teleflora. It wasn't her first venture though: Resnick cut her teeth in the marketing world more than 15 years earlier, having established a full-service advertising agency aged just 19.
The Wonderful Company specializes in health- and environment-conscious products including fruits, nuts, flowers, waters, and wines, and it holds the accolades of the world’s largest grower of tree nuts and America’s largest citrus grower. The business made $5 billion in revenue last year.
Together with her husband Tom, Judy Love built the Love’s Travel Shops & Country Stores chain. The business came from humble beginnings, starting out in 1964 when Judy’s father lent the pair $5,000 to lease a gas station in Oklahoma.
Judy was the company bookkeeper and ran the business alongside Tom until she returned to college in 1975. The chain remains family owned and operated, with the pair’s four children all working for the family business.
Love’s currently has more than 590 locations across 41 states, with estimated annual revenues of $25.5 billion.
Judy Faulkner made her fortune by combining her computer science studies with a master's degree in medicine. The result was Human Services Computing, a computerized health records company that she founded in 1979 from a basement in Madison, Wisconsin.
More than 40 years later Faulkner still serves as the company CEO, although the business is now known as Epic Systems. The software currently supports the medical records of more than 250 million people and is used by healthcare centers such as Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins.
In 2015 Faulkner signed the Giving Pledge and has committed to giving away 99% of her $7.1 billion fortune to a private charitable foundation.
In 2022 Diane Hendricks topped Forbes’ list of self-made women yet again, thanks to the Wisconsin roofing business she co-founded with her late husband. She was working as a realtor when she met roofing contractor Kenneth, who became her second husband in the late 1970s. They bought 100 houses together within three years of meeting and set up ABC Supply in 1982.
Hendricks was tragically widowed in 2007 when her husband died after a fall on a construction site. She's since led ABC Supply to make two of its biggest acquisitions, including the $1.5 billion purchase of rival Bradco Supply Corp in 2010.
The Hendricks Holding Company now has some 30 companies under its umbrella, ranging from manufacturing, transportation, and logistics to insurance. More recently, Hendricks has also turned her hand to the film industry, investing in "messages she thinks need to be heard."