A Walmart heiress born on October 7, 1949, Alice Louise Walton is the daughter of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton. the world’s second-richest lady.
Infancy and Childhood
Walton was raised in Newport, Arkansas, where he was raised by his parents.
She grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, where she and her three brothers attended Bentonville High School, where she graduated in 1966.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
Career
Before joining First Commerce Corporation and Arvest Bank Group, Walton worked as an equity analyst at First Commerce Corporation and a money manager at Arvest Bank Group.
EF Hutton employed her as a broker as well. Walton launched the investment bank Llama Company in 1988 and served as its president, chairwoman, and chief executive officer.
Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport opened in 1998 as a result of Walton’s efforts as head of the Northwest Arkansas Council.
A $109 million regional airport was needed in Northwest Arkansas at the time by the region’s business and civic leaders. Initial construction finance of $15 million was given by Walton. Llama Corporation, her company, backed a $79.5 million bond with its own money.
That’s why Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Authority gave the terminal building a name honoring Alice L. Walton’s services to the airport. The Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame inducted her in 2001.
Walton’s Rocking W Ranch near Millsap, Texas, was established in 1998 when Llama Co. went out of business in the late 1990s.
If you’ve ever wondered which 2-month-olds will become champion cutters, she was the answer. To focus on Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, she put the farm up for sale and moved from Bentonville, Ark., to Fort Worth in 2015, citing a desire to do so.
Sam Walton wrote in his autobiography Made in America that Alice was “Mavericks like myself, but even more volatile than I am.
Art
While on camping outings, Walton and her mother used to paint watercolors together. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, was built as a result of her passion for art and the Walton Family Foundation.
Walton bought a piece of art from the Daniel and Rita Fraad collection at Sotheby’s in New York in December 2004.
Walton allegedly paid $35 million for the famed artwork “Kindred Spirits” by Asher Brown Durand in a sealed-bid auction in 2005.
New York’s Public Library received the artwork, a tribute to Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, in 1904 from the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, a Romantic poet, and New York newspaper publisher featured in the painting.
For the opening of Crystal Bridges, she has acquired works by American artists Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, as well as a famous picture of George Washington by Charles Willson Peale. Walton purchased “Rosie the Riveter” by Norman Rockwell in 2009 for $4.9 million.
In an effort to kick the habit, Walton bought an Alfred Maurer picture that resembled a John Singer Sargent painting of a full-length woman smoking. Tom Wesselmann’s “Smoker #9” depicts a disembodied hand and mouth smoking a cigarette in hyper-realistic detail.
It was in a 2011 interview that she discussed the acquisition of masterpieces from other artists. He was “a really complex individual, slightly troubled but a very spiritual person, and adore the passion and feel and the spirituality of his work,” she said in an interview.
She went on to explain that “and Andrew Wyeth—the sense of mystery and desolation he conveys. How can you depict the feeling of being alone?
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Value of The Net
She possessed Walmart stock worth over $11 billion as of September 2016.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Walton is the world’s, second-richest lady and 20th richest person in the world with a net worth of $60.5 billion as of March 2022.
Life in The Private Sphere
Despite Walton’s young age, he married an established investment banker in Louisiana in 1974 and divorced two and a half years later. They divorced fast as well.
According to Forbes, she married the “contractor who built her swimming pool” soon after.
Walton was killed in a car accident, which was one of many he was engaged in. When she lost control of a leased Jeep while driving to an Acapulco family gathering for Thanksgiving in 1983, she fell into a gully and broke her leg.
As a result of her injuries, she was evacuated out of Mexico and had more than two dozen surgeries.
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Oleta Hardin, a 50-year-old woman, was struck and killed by her in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in April 1989. She was driving under the influence of alcohol when she hit a gas meter in 1998. She was fined $925.
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