This founder hated being a billionaire so much, he gave his company away. Meet Yvon Chouinard

These experiences shaped his outlook even when Patagonia developed into a business valued at approximately $3 billion.

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, once held billionaire status — a description he said he resented. In 2017, when Forbes magazine listed him among the world’s wealthiest individuals, Chouinard was angered enough to reconsider the future of his business.

Now aged 86, he no longer counted as a billionaire, having placed the entirety of his company into a trust and a nonprofit organisation. The decision ensured that Patagonia’s estimated $100 million in annual profits were directed towards addressing climate change and protecting wilderness areas, rather than into his personal fortune.

Chouinard’s lifestyle made his stance unsurprising. Known for his passion for rock climbing, he spent much of his early life living in basic conditions, relying on minimal resources.

In his 2005 autobiography, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, he described periods when he survived on very little. He wrote that in 1957 he and friends stayed in a hut in Mexico, living on fruit and fish, while making use of candles from a church to wax their surfboards. Before founding Patagonia in 1973, he sold climbing equipment from his car. “The profits were slim, though,” he recalled. “For weeks at a time I’d live on fifty cents to a dollar a day.”

At times, he went to greater lengths to economise. Damaged tins of cat food, which he purchased for five cents each, became a source of meals. During a summer spent in the Rockies with a companion, he said their food supply included oatmeal, potatoes, ground squirrel, and porcupine, which they killed with an ice axe.

Illness was frequent, caused by contaminated water, and medical treatment was beyond their means. Chouinard recounted that they devised their own cure by taking charcoal from a campfire, mixing it with half a cup of salt in water, and drinking it to induce vomiting.

These experiences shaped his outlook even when Patagonia developed into a business valued at approximately $3 billion. For Chouinard, being categorised as a billionaire was not a point of pride. Speaking to Fortune about his placement on the Forbes list in 2017, he said: “It really, really pissed me off.” He described the ranking not as an achievement but as a “policy failure.”

Chouinard did not regard selling the company or launching it on the stock market as viable alternatives. Both options, he argued, would have gone against his objectives. Selling the brand would have left him with several billion dollars personally, an outcome he actively wanted to avoid. Taking the company public was ruled out for similar reasons.

In 2022, he and his family chose a different structure. They transferred their ownership to a trust designed to safeguard Patagonia’s values, alongside a nonprofit organisation committed to environmental protection.