Alice Walton is world’s richest woman 2025

For the first time in five years, there’s a new richest woman on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list. With an estimated $101 billion fortune,

Alice Walton has taken back the title from L’Oréal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of France, who had claimed the crown since the 2021 list and who now ranks as the world’s second-richest woman (estimated net worth: $81.6 billion).

The only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton (d. 1992), Alice Walton is $28.7 billion richer than last year, thanks to a 40 per cent increase in the value of her estimated 11 per cent stake in the retail giant, which saw shoppers flock to its “Every Day Low Prices” amid high inflation. 

Bettencourt Meyers, on the other hand, is $17.9 billion poorer, after those same market forces helped send shares of the cosmetics conglomerate her grandfather Eugène Schueller (d. 1957) founded spiraling by nearly 20 per cent.

Walton, 75, is one of 15 members of the $100 Billion Club—those with fortunes spanning 12 digits—this year. She’s the second woman to ever reach centibillionaire status, following Bettencourt Meyers, 71, who accomplished the feat in June 2024.

Walton ranks as the 15th richest person in the world, a few spots behind her brothers Rob Walton, 80, and Jim Walton, 76, who are worth $110 billion and $109 billion, respectively.

After graduating from Trinity University in Texas in 1971, Alice Walton worked briefly as a buyer of children’s clothes at Walmart, before taking a job in New Orleans as a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton.

She returned to her family’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas during the 1980s to run investment operations at the Waltons’ Arvest Bank, before launching a lending and brokerage shop of her own called Llama with $19.5 million of family money. When Llama shut down in 1998, Walton moved back to Texas and shifted her focus to curating art.

She chaired the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville for a decade, before handing the reins to her nephew Tom Walton’s wife, Olivia Walton, in 2021. Alice is credited with founding the museum, which sits on 120 acres and features works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe, after realizing there wasn’t anything like it within 300 miles of her family’s hometown. Nearly all of the $1.6 billion it cost to open the facility in 2011 came from trusts in the names of her late brother John Walton and mother Helen Walton (d. 2007).

Alice Walton has ramped up her own philanthropy over the past decade, however, pouring more than $5.8 billion into five family charitable foundations that have doled out an estimated $1.7 billion of her funds to date. That includes an estimated $400 million gifted through the Walton Family Foundation (which her parents founded on Walmart’s 25th anniversary in 1987) to organizations focused on education reform, the environment and the region surrounding Bentonville. 

It also includes more than $500 million that Alice’s Art Bridges Foundation has spent acquiring and loaning out works of American art to more than 230 museums across the country—including the Art Institute of Chicago, the MoMA in New York City and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.—since its founding in 2016.

Last August, Walton’s Art Bridges Foundation reported that it had gifted another $249 million to help fund a new Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville that will “enhance traditional medical education with the arts, humanities, and whole health principles.” The school is set to enroll its first class of 48 students in July.

“I want to create opportunities that help people and communities achieve their dreams,” says Walton, in a quote posted to her namesake foundation’s website. “It is the joy of my life, and a privilege to do so.”