Mark Walter

Born in Iowa and schooled at Creighton University and Northwestern University Law School, Walter has a net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Wealth-X, a Singapore business-intelligence firm that assesses the fortunes of the ultra rich and ranks Walter seventh among Major League Baseball owners. Walter is not on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires. Most of Walter's fortune, Wealth-X says, derives from his stake in Guggenheim Partners, a 12-year-old firm founded with family money by a descendant of Meyer Guggenheim, the industrialist and mining magnate who came to this country from his native Switzerland in the 1840s. Walter was an accounting major at Creighton, where he played intramural sports and was a member of the Philosophy Society, among other activities. He earned a bachelor's degree in business in 1982 and graduated three years later from law school. He joined a Chicago law firm and later worked for First Chicago Capital Markets, but left in 1996 to found an investment firm, Liberty Hampshire Co., according to reports published at the time. While there he met J. Todd Morley, who would connect him with the Guggenheim fortune. Morley was chief executive of Links Holdings, a company that dealt in mortgage assets, when he and Walter met in 1999. Morley had been working with Peter Lawson-Johnston II to form Guggenheim Partners, and all three men hit it off. Lawson-Johnston is a great-grandson of Solomon R. Guggenheim, the founder of the New York art museum that bears the family name. Guggenheim Partners, which has headquarters in Chicago and New York and an office in Santa Monica, manages about $125 billion for wealthy individuals and institutional investors such as pension plans. In all, the firm has 25 offices in nine countries, and its 2,200 employees include investment bankers, securities traders, risk managers and research analysts. He and his wife, Kimbra, also a lawyer, live with their school-age daughter in Lincoln Park, a well-to-do neighborhood north of downtown Chicago and ajdacent to Lake Michigan.