John Thomas Walton, an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune and one of the wealthiest men in America, died on June 27 in a plane crash. He was 58.
Walton had just taken off from Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming on Monday afternoon when his homemade, ultralight aircraft crashed in Grand Teton National Park. He was the sole occupant of the plane, which weighed an estimated 400 to 500 pounds and ran on a small, gasoline-powered engine. Cause of the accident is under investigation.
The Arkansas native dropped out of The College of Wooster in Ohio, then served with the Green Berets as a medic in Vietnam. There he earned the Silver Star for saving the lives of several members of his unit while under enemy fire. When Walton returned to the states, he opted to have minimal involvement with the family business. Instead, he started a crop-dusting company in Texas and Arizona and a boat-building business in California.
Walton’s father was Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart and turned it into one of the biggest companies in the world. In March, John Walton and his younger brother Jim tied for No. 11 on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest people. (Spot No. 10 belongs to John’s older brother Rob, the chairman of Wal-Mart.) The sixth richest man in America, John Walton had a net worth of approximately $18.2 billion.
Through inheritance, Walton became a major stakeholder in Wal-Mart. He owned about 12 million shares of the company’s stock and shared ownership of about 1.7 billion shares with his family in a joint partnership called Walton Enterprises. Walton joined the board of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in 1992, and sat on the company committee that reviews Wal-Mart’s finances and oversees long-range planning, but was not considered to be a potential successor to his brother.
Although he was a successful businessman in his own right, Walton’s passion was philanthropy, particularly in the area of education. In 1998, he and Wall Street buyout artist Ted Forstmann co-founded the Children’s Scholarship Fund. To date, the fund has provided tuition assistance to more than 67,000 low-income families that want to send their kids to private schools. In his spare time, Walton loved to fly. He also enjoyed skydiving, scuba diving and riding motorcycles.