SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT
From baseball and video games to gambling and porn, 16 people became billionaires this year by providing a welcome reprieve during a year of roiling markets, global pandemic and war.
Some of the most intriguing:
Tom Werner
$1.6 bil • Television, sports team • U.S.
The exec behind TV hits like That ’70s Show and The Cosby Show, Werner cofounded Fenway Sports Group, which controls the Boston Red Sox, Liverpool FC and the Pittsburgh Penguins, in 2001.
Peter Jackson
$1.5 bil • Movies, digital effects •
New Zealand
The Lord of the Rings director became a billionaire in November when he sold a stake in his Weta digital film effects shop to Unity Software for some $975 million.
Xu Zhenhua
$1.5 bil • Online games • China
Xu is cofounder of Moonton Games, best known for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. TikTok owner ByteDance bought Moonton in March 2021 for approximately $4 billion.
Carsten Koerl
$1.2 bil • Sports data • Germany Sportradar, which Koerl founded in 2001, compiles and distributes play-by-play data and real-time stats from 83 sports to media companies and betting operators worldwide. It has partnerships with the NBA, NHL and MLB (but not the NFL).
Park Kwan-ho
$1.2 bil • Online games • South Korea
His company, Wemade, led a wave of South Korean game makers adopting a “play-to-earn” model in which gamers earn crypto tokens based on how long they play. Its P2E fantasy game, MIR4, hit more than 1 million downloads within two months of its August launch.
Leonid Radvinsky
$1.2 bil • E-commerce • U.S.
During Covid-19 lockdowns, OnlyFans emerged as a hugely popular video and social site for adult performers. Radvinsky, a veteran of the online porn world through webcam site MyFreeCams, invested in 2018.
Ken Kendrick
$1 bil • Banking, sports team • U.S. Kendrick parlayed success in software and banking into the largest single stake in MLB’s Arizona Diamondbacks. He also owns one of the world’s most valuable baseball card collections, which has such rarities as a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, and is estimated to be worth nine figures.
Mark Rein
$1 bil • Video games • U.S.
Rein joined Epic Games in 1992, when it was less than a year old. Smash hits like Fortnite and its industry standard Unreal graphics engine have since catapulted it to a $28.7 billion valuation. He owns a 4% stake.