Riley P. Bechtel

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

(1952-03-25) March 25, 1952 (age 69)
Alameda County, California, US
Alma mater University of California, Davis
Stanford University
OccupationBusinessman
TitleFormer chairman, Bechtel Corporation
Spouse(s)Susan 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, their estimated net worth is US$2.7 billion.

Contents

Early life

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

Brook Byers

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.

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.

David J. OReilly

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

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

Herbert Fisk Johnson III, known as Fisk, is an American businessman. He is the fifth generation of his family to lead S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc of Racine, Wisconsin, as chairman and CEO.

Samuel Lou Ginn, is an American businessman.

William T. Coleman III is 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.

Robert Wolf is the former Chairman and CEO of UBS Americas as well as the President and Chief Operating Officer of UBS# Investment Bank.

George Shultz American politician (1920–2021)

George Pratt Shultz was an American economist, diplomat, and businessman. He served in various positions under three different Republican presidents and is one of only two people to have held four different Cabinet-level posts. Shultz played a major role in shaping the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration. From 1974 to 1982, he was an executive of the Bechtel Group, an engineering and services company. In the 2010s, Shultz was a prominent figure in the scandal of the biotech firm Theranos, continuing to support it as a board member in the face of mounting evidence of fraud.

Trevor Fetter is an American businessman, the lead independent director of The Hartford Financial Services Group, and the former president, CEO, and chairman of Tenet Healthcare. He is a senior lecturer in the General Management unit of Harvard Business School (HBS), teaching Leadership and Corporate Accountability in its MBA program; his alma mater, where he is also a founding member of the HBS Healthcare Initiative Advisory Board, and a former member of the Board of Dean's Advisors. He has appeared several times on the “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare" list compiled by Modern Healthcare.

Jim Breyer American venture capitalist (born 1961)

James W. Breyer is an American venture capitalist, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a 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.

Gururaj Deshpande

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.

Mike Volpi

Michelangelo "Mike" Volpi is an Italian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He worked as an engineer, eventually becoming chief strategy officer at Cisco Systems during the company’s growth era, acquiring over 70 companies in less than five years. He co-founded Index Ventures’ San Francisco office with Danny Rimer in 2009.

Ole Andreas Halvorsen is a Norwegian-born hedge fund manager. He is the CEO and a co-founder of the Connecticut-based hedge fund, Viking Global Investors. Viking had $24 billion under management as of October, 2017. Halvorsen has consistently ranked among the top earning hedge fund managers, placing 11th in Forbes' 2012 rankings and 9th in 2015, according to Institutional Investor's Alpha.

Theranos was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. The company claimed that it devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and could be performed rapidly, thanks to the small automated devices the company had developed. However, these claims were later proven to be false.

Elizabeth Holmes American biotechnology businesswoman and criminal (born 1984)

Elizabeth Anne Holmes is an American former biotechnology entrepreneur who was convicted of criminal fraud. In 2003, Holmes founded and was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company that soared in valuation after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. In the following year, as revelations of potential 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".

Alan D. Schnitzer is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Travelers Companies, Inc., a leading provider of property casualty insurance for auto, home and business. He was previously Vice Chairman of Travelers, and Chief Executive Officer of the company's Business and International Insurance segment. Schnitzer oversaw Travelers’ Field Management, Corporate Communications and Public Policy organizations.

Theresia Gouw

Theresia Gouw is an entrepreneur and venture capital investor in the technology sector. She worked at Bain & Company, Release Software and Accel Partners before co-founding Aspect Ventures, a female-led venture capital firm, in 2014. Gouw was named one of the 40 most influential minds in tech by Time Magazine. and has been recognized seven times on the Forbes Midas List as one of the "world's smartest tech investors". According to Forbes.com, Gouw is the richest female venture capitalist, with a net worth of approximately $500 million, primarily due to her involvement with Accel (company)'s early investment in Facebook.

Young Sohn

Young Sohn (Korean: 손영권) is a Korean-American business executive and investor. He is 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.

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. ↑ https://campus.thacher.org/pdf/news/TN-spr-sum00.pdf [ dead 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.