Peterffy is chairman of Interactive Brokers, the world's largest electronic broker. The Greenwich, Connecticut-based has more than $10 billion in equity capital and processes equities, futures and foreign exchange trades. Peterffy owns his stake through IBG Holdings, which controls about 82% of the company.
Thomas Peterffy's net worth of $18.0B can buy ...
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The majority of Peterffy's fortune is derived from Interactive Brokers Group. It's the largest electronic broker by daily average revenue trades and has more than $10 billion in equity capital, according to its website.
His stake in the business is calculated using his 89% stake in closely held IBG Holdings, which controls about 78% of publicly traded IBG, according to its 2021 proxy statement. Peterffy controls about 5% of the class A shares and all of the class B shares through IBG Holdings, according to the 2021 proxy statement and a January 2022 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The 100 class B shares were equal to 400 million class A shares at the time of the group's 2007 initial public offering, when it sold 40 million of the A shares -- 10% -- to the public.
The billionaire collected about $1 billion from Interactive Brokers's initial public offering in 2007, according to the prospectus. Dividends are paid to IBG Holdings on the amount of class B shares (100) not their equivalent value in membership interests (339 million), according to Deborah Liston of Interactive Brokers' investor relations.
In December 2017, cumulative tax gross-up payments to Peterffy from Interactive Brokers were removed from his net worth analysis because an undisclosed portion of the funds probably went to pay a tax liability. The change resulted in a $2.7 billion drop in his net worth.
Katherine Ewert, a spokesperson for Interactive Brokers, declined to comment on the net worth calculation.
Born in Budapest during a World War II bombing raid in 1944, Peterffy left his native country in 1965. At the time, he was living under the yoke of the Soviets, who invaded and occupied Hungary after the 1956 uprising in the then-Eastern Bloc country. Seeing little hope, he emigrated to the U.S.
According to a 2008 interview Peterffy gave to a magazine published by the CME Group, he landed a job with an engineering firm in New York and volunteered to learn computer programming, a task he said was easier than learning English. Peterffy got his first exposure to Wall Street as a computer consultant with Aranyi Associates, a company owned by another Hungarian immigrant who worked on stock and bond valuation programming. Peterffy also worked at Mocatta Metals, a commodities trader, before deciding to strike out on his own in 1977.
That year, he bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange to trade options. Within a year, he began working on automating the process, using valuation sheets to improve the odds of profitable bidding on contracts. He founded a market making firm named Timber Hill in 1982, using hand held computers he built to track and calculate trades. He expanded into new markets, including the early Chicago S&P 500 options pits in the late 1980s.
In subsequent years, he expanded into Europe and Asia and, in 1995, opened what is now Interactive Brokers, facilitating trades electronically for individual investors. He and his minority partners sold 10 percent of the partnership that controls Interactive Brokers in a 2007 public offering.
A long-time resident of Greenwich, Connecticut, Peterffy now lives in Palm Beach, Florida. He paid for and starred in commercials advocating Mitt Romney for president during the 2012 U.S. presidential election.