How Zara boss Amancio Ortega makes and spends his billions: one of 2023’s top wealth gainers built a fast-fashion empire that owns Bershka and Pull&Bear – and he has an incredible property portfolio
- Ortega started making clothes in the 1960s in provincial Spain and eventually co-founded Zara and incorporated it into Inditex; in 2023, he’s the only top 10 wealth gainer who isn’t in tech
- The 86-year-old billionaire keeps his life private and low-key, preferring to invest in prime property in NYC and London, and spending time with daughter Marta at equestrian events
The index places Ortega as the 14th richest person in the world in 2023. Despite running major fashion retailer Inditex for four decades, he’s intensely private – there were no public photographs of him until 1999, and in 2012, Bloomberg noted that he had only ever granted interviews to three journalists.
One Zara employee who worked with him told The Economist in 2016 that “the true story of Amancio Ortega has not been told”.
So what do we know about the super-private retail mogul who has an estimated net worth of US$75 billion?
Amancio Ortega comes from humble beginnings
The 86-year-old was born in northwestern Spain in 1936, the son of a railroad worker and a stay-at-home mother. He started making clothes with his siblings and future wife Rosalia Mera in their home in the early 1960s. In 1975, Ortega and Mera opened the first Zara store in downtown La Coruña, Spain.
“Zara” wasn’t actually his first choice for the store’s name. He was planning to name it Zorba after the film Zorba the Greek, but there was already a local bar with the same name. Because he’d already bought moulds of the letters Z-O-R-B-A, he made do with what he had and ended up with the name Zara.
How he became a fashion behemoth
