How Did Phil Knight Get So Rich?

Phil Knight is one of the richest people in the world, thanks to his marketing acumen. The American businessman built one of the most recognizable brands on the planet in Nike Inc (NYSE:NKE). The Beaverton, Oregon-based athletic footwear and apparel company is valued at over $275 billion.

How did Phil Knight get so rich? Here’s the story.

Knight is a self-made man. His father, a newspaper publisher, believed he needed to work on his own through school. As an avid sports fan, he dove headfirst into sporting news and research while earning his journalism degree.

This media training would become pivotal in shaping Nike’s iconic advertising and marketing campaigns. It seems obvious that Nike is partnered with successful professional athletes across all sports, but it wasn’t always that way.

Knight created the world’s most recognizable apparel brand and built an empire on the backs and feet of the most popular athletes in the game.

How Phil Knight Made His Money?

Nike was founded in 1962 as Blue Ribbon Sports by co-founders Knight and Bill Bowerman, his track coach at University of Oregon. The company began by distributing running shows before designing its own with a focus on high performance and low price. The men leveraged their track-and-field connections to cater directly to athletes.

By 1978, the company changed its name to Nike and had its shoes on the winners of the Boston Marathon, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open. Players for the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers also wore Nike shoes during the era.

However, the company changed directions in the 1980s to focus on marketing as much as its footwear innovations. According to a 1992 Harvard Business Review interview with Knight, it combined research and development with a powerful marketing machine to catapult the firm above $1 billion in revenue.

The company’s ads and taglines are unforgettable, from “Just Do It” in 1988 to Bo Jackson’s “Bo Knows,” Charles Barkley’s “I am not a role model,” and Colin Keapernick’s controversial 2018 spot. Of course, Michael Jordan will always be associated with the brand, thanks to his trailblazing Air Jordans partnership.

And as the largest individual shareholder, Knight became one of the world’s wealthiest living people.

How Much Does Phil Knight Own of Nike?

Knight personally owns over 31.4 million Class A shares and over 3.3 million Class B shares in Nike, according to SEC filings in 2020. His son Travis Knight owns over 40 million shares.

The Knight family also has a limited liability company named Swoosh that holds a whopping 257 million shares. This makes it the largest institutional shareholder, with over about 16.5 percent of outstanding shares.

Swoosh is a holding firm controlled by the Knight family, and the patriarch transferred his voting power in it to a trust owned by Travis.

This structure ensures the family will retain a level of control over the company for many more years to come.

How Did Nike Get Its Name?

Nike was originally founded as Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS). Much of its early sales came from running shoes manufactured by a Japanese company now known as Asics (OTCMKTS:ASCCY). Its initial name change was a tough decision.

Knight suggested Dimension Six, while others suggest animal names inspired by Puma (OTCMKTS:PUMSY) like Peregrine and Bengal. But a branding guide at the time showcasing two-syllable names with one exotic letter convinced them to suggest Nike.

Nike is the Greek goddess of victory, and Knight initially hated the name. He also didn’t love the logo at first. Still, he went along with it, and by 1972, it started gaining brand recognition.

The now-iconic Swoosh logo was created around the same time by Carolyn Davidson, a Portland-based graphic design student. It’s a simple design meant to convey motion and speed, and it’s also said to symbolize a wing from the goddess.

While he didn’t initially love the branding, Knight was wise to use it. Today, the Nike brand itself is worth nearly $40 billion, which is about equal to its annual revenue.

Is Phil Knight a Billionaire?

Knight and his family have an estimated net worth of around $63.4 billion, according to Forbes. This puts the self-made billionaire among the 20 richest people in the world. And he’s known as one of the most generous philanthropists in the history of his home state of Oregon.

A 2016 report from the Portland Business Journal estimated he gave away nearly $2 billion by that point, and he hasn’t slowed down with age. He and his wife Penny Knight gave away an estimated $1.37 billion in 2020 alone.

Yet they still ensure their children are well taken care of and memorialized in the same manner.

What Do Phil Knight’s Children Do?

Phil and Penny Knight had three children together. Matthew Knight (whose name is now used on a University of Oregon multi-sports arena) died while scuba diving in May 2004 at the age of 34.

Daughter Christina Knight is an Executive Creative Director, and son Travis runs an animation studio called Laika, also owned by his father.

After a brief rap career, Travis shifted into animation after his father took over a failing production studio to reorganize it. This gave him plenty of experience behind animated films like Coraline, and The Boxtrolls before he directed his first live-action movie Bumblebee from the Transformers series.

Travis also sits on the board of directors for Nike, a position he assumed as his father stepped down as chairman. It’s clear he trusts his son with the company he built from the ground up.

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