Riley P. Bechtel

Last updated
Riley P. Bechtel
Born
Riley Peart Bechtel [1]

(1952-03-25) March 25, 1952 (age 72)
Alameda County, California, U.S.
Education University of California, Davis (BA)
Stanford University (JD, MBA)
OccupationBusinessman
TitleFormer chairman, Bechtel Corporation
SpouseSusan Bechtel
Children3, including Brendan

Riley Peart Bechtel CBE (born March 25, 1952) [1] is an American billionaire heir and businessman. He was the chairman of the Bechtel Corporation until April 2017. [2] [3] As of July 2021, his estimated net worth is US$2.7 billion.

Contents

Early life and education

He is the great-grandson of Warren A. Bechtel, the company's founder. His parents were Elizabeth Hogan and Stephen Bechtel Jr., who was the former chairman and CEO of the company. [4]

He attended The Thacher School, a boarding school. [5] [6] He received a bachelor's degree in political science and psychology from the University of California, Davis, and a JD/MBA from Stanford University in 1977. [3] He was admitted to the State Bar of California in November 1979 and joined the American Bar Association. [3]

Career

He worked for the law firm of Thelen, Marrin, Johnson & Bridges. [3] He joined Bechtel full-time in 1981 and was elected president and chief operating officer in March 1989. [3] He became CEO in June 1990. [3] In January 1996, he also became chairman of Bechtel. [3]

He sits on the board of directors of the international council of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (since 1995), the Fremont Group (owned by Bechtel Corporation), the Fremont Group (which in turn runs Trinity Ventures, LP), Fremont Investors, Inc. (owned by Bechtel Corporation), and Sequoia Ventures, Inc. (limited partner of Bechtel Corporation). [3] He was a board member of Theranos. [7]

He is a former member of the Trilateral Commission, the American Society of Corporate Executives, The Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and the National Petroleum Council. [3] He sits on the corporate council of the Conservation Fund and the Board of Trustees of the Ocean Exploration Trust. [3] He also sits on the governing board of the Indian School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business advisory council, Stanford Law School Dean's advisory council, and UC Davis' board of visitors. [3] He was appointed to the President's Export Council by George W. Bush. In 1998, he and his father were presented with the Honor Award from the National Building Museum for their company's contributions to America's built environment. [8] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. [2] [3] He is also an Honorary Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and an Honorary Lifetime member of the American Society of Safety Engineers. [3]

Wealth

According to Forbes , his estimated net worth is US$3 billion, as of October 2021. [9]

Personal life

He resides in California with his wife, Susan. He is a member of the Augusta National Golf Club as well as the all-male Bohemian Club in San Francisco and attends its annual encampment, the Bohemian Grove. He is consistently ranked in the top 200 richest people in the US and the top 500 richest people in the world by Forbes magazine. [10] In February 2014, Bechtel announced that, after 25 years, he was stepping down as CEO of Bechtel Corporation because of health reasons associated with Parkinson's disease. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Percy Barnevik</span> Swedish businessman

Percy Nils Barnevik HonFREng is a Swedish business executive, best known as CEO and later Chairman of ABB 1988–2002, and for being the centre of a giant pension dispute that shook Sweden in 2003. He is the co-founder of the non-profit organization Hand in Hand.

Niall FitzGerald is an Irish businessman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brook Byers</span>

Brook Byers is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the brother of Stanford University Professor Tom Byers and Atlanta, Georgia engineering entrepreneur Ken Byers.

Richard Marco Kovacevich is an American business executive and the former CEO of Wells Fargo & Company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Doerr</span> American businessman (born 1951)

L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 40th richest person in tech in 2017 and, as of 1 August, 2023, as the 146th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$11.9 billion. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Bechtel Jr.</span> American businessman (1925–2021)

Stephen Davison Bechtel Jr. was an American billionaire, businessman, civil engineer, and co-owner of the Bechtel Corporation. He was the son of Stephen Davison Bechtel Sr. and grandson of Warren A. Bechtel, who founded the Bechtel Corporation. He was known for expanding the global footprint of the corporation through several of its international projects. Some of the projects executed under his leadership of the company included King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh as well as Jubail Industrial City in Saudi Arabia as well as oil platforms in the North Sea, liquefied natural gas plants in Algeria, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave O'Reilly</span>

David J. O'Reilly, is former chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Draper</span> American businessman

Timothy Cook Draper is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Draper University, Draper Venture Network, Draper Associates and Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, PrettyLitter and Focus Media. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized bitcoins from the Silk Road website. Draper is a proponent of Bitcoin and decentralization. Draper was also one of the first investors in Theranos.

Edmund Wattis Littlefield (1914–2001) was a prominent California businessman, philanthropist, and member of the Bohemian Club.

Samuel Lou Ginn, is an American businessman.

William T. Coleman III was an American businessman who served as the CEO of Veritas Technologies. He was also a partner at Alsop Louie Partners. He has been the founder, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of various high-profile corporations, including BEA Systems and Cassatt Corporation, and has been a director at Symantec Corporation since 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Shultz</span> American politician (1920–2021)

George Pratt Shultz was an American economist, businessman, diplomat and statesman. He served in various positions under two different Republican presidents and is one of the only two persons to have held four different Cabinet-level posts, the other being Elliot Richardson. Shultz played a major role in shaping the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration, and conservative foreign policy thought thereafter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Breyer</span> American venture capitalist (born 1961)

James W. Breyer is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. Breyer has invested in over 40 companies that have gone public or completed a merger, with some of these investments, including Facebook, earning over 100 times cost and many others over 25 times cost. On the Forbes 2021 list of the 400 richest Americans, he was ranked #389, with a net worth of US$2.9 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gururaj Deshpande</span> Indian-American entrepreneur

Gururaj Deshpande is an Indian American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, who is best known for co-founding the Chelmsford, MA-based internet equipment manufacturer Sycamore Networks, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT and the Deshpande Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Volpi</span>

Michelangelo "Mike" Volpi is an Italian-American businessman and venture capitalist.

Theranos Inc. was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices that the company had developed. These claims were proven to be false.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hamid Moghadam</span> Iranian-American business executive and philanthropist

Hamid Moghadam is an Iranian-American business executive and philanthropist. In 2011, Moghadam orchestrated the combination between AMB, a firm he co-founded in 1983, and ProLogis to create Prologis, the largest logistics real estate company in the world. Moghadam currently serves as Prologis Chairman and CEO, with Prologis operating as a global logistics real estate investment trust (REIT) and S&P 100 company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Holmes</span> American businesswoman (born 1984)

Elizabeth Anne Holmes is an American biotechnology entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud in connection to her blood-testing company, Theranos. The company's valuation soared after it claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. In 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. In the following year, as revelations of fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brendan Bechtel</span> American business executive

Brendan Peters Bechtel is an American businessman who is the chairman and chief executive officer of Bechtel, the second largest construction company in the United States, which has operations in 160 countries. The great-great-grandson of founder Warren A. Bechtel, he became CEO at the age of 35, and is the fifth generation of the Bechtel family to lead the privately owned company since 1898. Bechtel chairs the infrastructure committee of the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group representing CEOs of some of the largest companies in the country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young Sohn</span>

Young Sohn (Korean: 손영권) is a Korean-American business executive and investor. He was the president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics. Sohn is also the chairman of the board of Harman International Industries, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, and currently serves as Senior Advisor to Samsung.

References

  1. 1 2 "The birth of Riley Bechtel". Californiabirthindex.org.
  2. 1 2 "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 29, 2011.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Bechtel biography Archived 2008-04-09 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ Beta Theta Pi Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ↑ Wallack, Todd (14 December 2003). "Why some big-time donors like to stay under wraps / When discretion is the better part of philanthropy". SFGATE. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  6. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-11-02. Retrieved 2020-10-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  7. ↑ "A singular board at Theranos". Fortune. June 12, 2014. Retrieved 2015-10-12.
  8. ↑ National Building Museum
  9. ↑ "Riley Bechtel & family". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-10-26.
  10. ↑ "Forbes.com: Forbes 400 Richest in America 2002". www.forbes.com.
  11. ↑ Engineering News-Record
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.