Islamabad: Pakistani-American, Shahid Khan, is the 66th richest man in the United States in 2020, with a total worth of $7.8 billion.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos with a total worth of $179bn has retained his number one spot for the third year in a row, followed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates at number two with a net worth of $111bn and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with $85bn ranks third on the list.
Khan, born into a middle-class family of Lahore in 1950, is an engineer by trade who now lives in Southwest Florida’s beach town of Naples. Khan arrived in America to study engineering at the University of Illinois at the age of 16 with $500 in his pocket and no place to stay. His first job in America was washing dishes for $1.20 an hour.
Khan - who bought auto parts supplier Flex-N-Gate from his former employer in 1980 - is now among America’s billionaires and the owner of global automotive manufacturing business. His innovative one-piece truck bumper designs earned him fame and success, as he now owns 64 manufacturing plants worldwide with over 24,000 employees.
In 1977, the business tycoon married his college sweetheart, Ann Carlson Khan, and they have two children, Tony and Shanna.
Pursuing his American dream, Khan became the first ethnic-minority owner in National Football League (NFL) in 2011 when he purchased the Jacksonville Jaguars team for $770 million. The team is now worth $2.3 billion and ranked as 44th most valuable professional sports franchise in the world by Forbes. He later bought UK’s Fulham football club in 2013. Khan and his son, Tony, launched a professional wrestling entertainment company and a competitor to WWE known as All Elite Wrestling in 2019. He is also a major financial backer of Black News Channel, a 24-hour cable news channel, launched in 2020.
Khan, 70, featured on the front cover of Forbes magazine in 2012 and was described the “New Face of the American Dream.”
