Yvon Chouinard, who is now 86, may have been a millionaire at one point, but he disliked the title so much that he gave up his firm, Patagonia.
Chouinard was allegedly furious when Forbes put his name on the list of billionaires in 2017. He saw it as a “policy failure” instead of a milestone.
He told Fortune that the Forbes list “really, really pissed me off.”
A Life of Being Thrifty
Chouinard has been a rock climber for most of his life. He has spent decades living simply, often sleeping in the woods and getting by with only the most basic things. In his 2005 autobiography, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, he talked about some rather extreme ways he saved money, like eating cat chow and drinking charcoal water.
In 1957, he and some buddies stayed in a shack in Mexico and ate fruit and fish to stay alive. They even used church lights to wax their surfboards. Chouinard sold climbing gear out of his van to make ends meet before starting Patagonia in 1973.
He wrote, “The profits were small, though.” “I’d live on fifty cents to a dollar a day for weeks at a time.”
He sometimes bought defective cans of cat food for five cents each to save money. He lived on oatmeal, potatoes, ground squirrels, and porcupines they hunted with an ice ax over a summer in the Rockies. They regularly got sick from drinking dirty water, so they drank a mix of charcoal and salt to make themselves throw up.
Giving Away His Billions
Chouinard didn’t want to sell Patagonia or take it public when he became a billionaire. Selling would have gone against his values because it would have made him richer. An IPO was also not an option.
Chouinard and his family put their shares in a trust and a nonprofit in 2022. This way, Patagonia’s $100 million in revenues per year go straight to combating climate change and safeguarding wild regions.
He remarked, “I wanted to get off the list of the world’s richest people, but selling Patagonia or going public wasn’t an option.”
Chouinard’s brave move is now one of the most well-known examples of a billionaire utilizing their money to help the world instead of themselves.