7. Dieter Schwarz – $21.1 billion
Thanks to a 7% rise in sales at his privately discount retail group, Dieter Schwarz’s fortune has burst past $21 billion. And has increased valuations of comparable publicly traded companies.
It all started because of Dieter’s father, Josef, who started Schwarz Group with a revenue estimated at $91 billion, now is comprised of the Lidl and Kaufland store chains.
Schwarz was a regular apparition on Forbes’ annual billionaires ranking in the 1990s but was taken off the list in 1999 after making the case to Forbes that he had transferred his ownership of Lidl to a charitable foundation.
However, he returned to the list in 2013, after research showed that the Dieter Schwarz Foundation is a limited liability company with a charitable purpose, not a charitable foundation.
A deeply private person who shuns all publicity, Schwarz is married with two children.
