Anthony Black
$5 million
Henry Roberts Kravis has a net worth of $11.1 billion, accumulated over five decades as co-founder and Co-Executive Chairman of KKR & Co., one of the world’s largest private equity and alternative asset management firms. He is widely regarded as the architect of the modern leveraged buyout, having pioneered deal structures that reshaped corporate America from the 1970s onward.
Updated March 2026: According to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Henry Kravis holds a net worth of approximately $11.1 billion, derived primarily from his roughly 9% ownership stake in KKR, which has grown into a $600+ billion assets-under-management firm.
Henry Kravis was born on January 6, 1944, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a Jewish family with strong ties to business. His father, Raymond F. Kravis, was an oil engineer and a business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy. His mother was Bessie Roberts Kravis. Growing up in a household that discussed finance and deal-making at the dinner table, Henry developed an early interest in how capital was deployed.
He attended Eaglebrook School and then Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut, where he cultivated the work ethic and social networks that would prove useful in his Wall Street career. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Claremont McKenna College in 1967, then pursued a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School in 1969, where he studied under value investing pioneer Benjamin Graham’s disciples. The Columbia MBA placed him directly in the orbit of Bear Stearns, where he joined immediately upon graduation.
Kravis joined Bear Stearns in 1969, working under mentor Jerome Kohlberg Jr., a senior banker who had pioneered the concept of using borrowed capital to fund corporate acquisitions — a technique then known as bootstrap transactions. Alongside Kohlberg and his cousin George Roberts, Kravis refined and scaled these acquisition methods throughout the early 1970s. When Bear Stearns resisted their proposal to formalize a dedicated buyout division, the three men departed and co-founded Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) in 1976 with $120,000 in starting capital.
KKR’s early years established the leveraged buyout as a legitimate institutional strategy. The firm’s 1979 acquisition of Houdaille Industries for $380 million was the first LBO of a public industrial company. In 1987, Jerome Kohlberg departed over philosophical differences about deal size and risk; KKR retained the name. In 1989, Kravis and Roberts orchestrated the acquisition of RJR Nabisco for $31.4 billion — the largest corporate buyout in history at the time, chronicled in the bestselling book and subsequent film Barbarians at the Gate. That single transaction cemented KKR’s position as the dominant force in private equity globally.
Subsequent landmark deals include the $45 billion acquisition of TXU (later Energy Future Holdings) in 2007 — the largest leveraged buyout ever completed — and a series of transformative corporate carve-outs across technology, healthcare, and infrastructure. KKR went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010, a move that created direct public market valuation of Kravis’s equity stake. He served as Co-CEO until 2021, when he transitioned to Co-Executive Chairman alongside Roberts, handing operational management to Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall.
As of early 2026, KKR manages more than $600 billion in assets across private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and credit, per KKR’s corporate website. Kravis continues to represent the firm at major global forums, including the Milken Institute Global Conference and the Berlin Global Dialogue.
Kravis has been married three times. His first marriage to Helene Diane Shulman produced three children: Harrison S. Kravis (1972–1991), who died in a car accident; Robert R. Kravis (born 1973); and Kimberly Kravis Schulhof (born 1975). He was married to fashion designer Carolyne Roehm from 1985 to 1993. Since 1994, he has been married to economist and policy advisor Marie-Josée Drouin Kravis, who serves on the boards of multiple institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Hudson Institute.
The Kravises maintain residences in New York City, Palm Beach, Southampton, Paris, and Sharon, Connecticut. Henry is a major Republican donor and has contributed to presidential campaigns and party committees over multiple election cycles.
Philanthropy is a central part of Kravis’s legacy. Through the Kravis Foundation, he donated $100 million to Columbia Business School, which named its main hall Kravis Hall. He also donated a reported $100 million to Loomis Chaffee School (announced April 2024), one of the largest gifts ever made to a secondary school in the United States. Additional philanthropy targets Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Lincoln Center.
In the business world, Kravis is often referenced alongside figures like Elon Musk, whose ventures also involve large-scale capital allocation, and motivational entrepreneurs like Tony Robbins, who has spoken frequently about the mindset behind Kravis-era deal-making.
Henry Kravis’s net worth is approximately $11.1 billion as of 2026, according to the Forbes Billionaires list and Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The majority of his wealth is held in his approximately 9% KKR equity stake.
KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.) is a global investment firm managing over $600 billion in assets across private equity, real estate, credit, and infrastructure. Kravis co-founded it in 1976 with $120,000 in capital alongside Jerome Kohlberg and George Roberts, pioneering the leveraged buyout as a mainstream financial strategy. The 1989 RJR Nabisco LBO, valued at $31.4 billion, remains one of the most consequential corporate transactions in American financial history.
Henry Kravis has been married to economist and policy advisor Marie-Josée Kravis since 1994. He was previously married to fashion designer Carolyne Roehm (1985–1993) and Helene Diane Shulman, with whom he has two surviving adult children.