Amancio Ortega didn't go to college. He didn't inherit a fortune. He started at 13, folding shirts in a small shop in La Coruña, Spain—a city most of the world had never heard of. Yet Amancio Ortega would go on to build Inditex and the Zara empire into the largest fast fashion machine on the planet, eventually overtaking Bill Gates as the world's richest person. That story—raw, methodical, almost invisibly executed—is one of the most important business narratives of the last century. And most people still don't know his name.
Today, Inditex—the holding company Ortega founded in 1985—generates an estimated $31 billion in annual revenue. Ortega personally owns 59% of it. His real estate holdings through Pontegadea are valued at $17.2 billion, spanning Miami skyscrapers, Amazon's Seattle offices, and energy stakes in Spain. The man who began by sewing bathrobes with his siblings now controls an empire that stretches across 77 countries.
