What is Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s net worth?
▼ £23.519 billion
£29.688 billion in 2023
Ratcliffe’s performance in the London Marathon this year says a lot about his character. The chemicals billionaire may be in his early seventies but he has lost none of his hunger for hefty undertakings — be that a 26.2-mile run through London or turning around Manchester United, the football club he has adored since he was a boy. Both endeavours are exercises in patience — for the competitor and the fans.
Raised on a council estate in Failsworth, northeast Manchester, Ratcliffe secured a 25 per cent stake in the Reds last December and has since taken control of Old Trafford’s sporting operations. He plans to create a “Wembley of the north” for the club and hopes the £2 billion project will revive southwest Manchester, a rundown area he describes as the cradle of the industrial revolution.
Ratcliffe’s family later moved to the northeast and he earned pocket money by selling Golden Goal lottery tickets outside Hull City’s ground. After an unexceptional school and university career at Beverley Grammar School and the University of Birmingham, he was sacked from his first job, at BP, after three days because he suffered from mild eczema: it was felt the condition would leave him unable to work in the company’s labs.
It wasn’t until he was well into his forties that Ratcliffe, 71, started his petrochemicals giant. He mortgaged his house for £140,000 to do his first big deal and three decades later he is estimated to be the biggest private energy operator in the North Sea.
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He puts his success down to hard work, giving up a job in middle-management with Courtaulds to strike out on his own. Nevertheless, friends call him Lucky Jim. “It’s odd, but I find the harder I work, the luckier I get,” he says with a laugh, echoing Thomas Jefferson.
Ineos buys unloved plants from corporations such as BP on the cheap and gives them a new lease of life. Today it has 194 sites operating across 29 countries and more than 26,000 staff. With characteristic understatement Ratcliffe describes Ineos as “the biggest company in the world you have never heard of”. It produces everything from pharmaceuticals to the plastic used in Lego and includes Grangemouth Refinery on the Firth of Forth, which supplies most of the petrol and diesel used by Scotland and the north of England.
Nevertheless, Ineos is a difficult company to track because of its complex structure and reluctance to publish consolidated accounts. Profits at Ineos Group Holdings SA, one of the group’s larger companies, were 40 per cent lower in 2023 than in 2022. Higher energy costs, interest rates and inflation have squeezed margins, the company said. On that basis we have lowered our valuation of Ineos to £30 billion. Ratcliffe owns slightly less than 62 per cent of the shares, and we have added £5 billion to account for his wealth outside the company.
Ineos’s success has allowed Ratcliffe to indulge his many passions, including devising and selling the Grenadier, a 4×4 inspired by the Land Rover Defender, and the Fusilier, an electric 4×4 he hopes to have on the road by 2027. Ineos owns a number of sporting interests besides Manchester United, including the French Ligue 1 team OGC Nice and the Swiss club FC Lausanne-Sport. He has a third of the shares in the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team and his cycling outfit, Ineos Grenadiers, will be hoping for glory in this summer’s Tour de France.
An imposing 6ft 4in, he is whippet lean and it’s no surprise to learn that his enthusiasm for business deals is matched by his enthusiasm for fitness and exploration. He is possibly the only billionaire to have reached both Poles: the North Pole in 2009, after an exhausting trek pulling a heavy sledge across shifting ice floes; the South Pole in 2011, walking 200km in the footsteps of Ernest Shackleton. “It was one of the more miserable experiences of my life,” he said. “But there’s no feeling quite like getting [there]… It’s the highs and lows of life, isn’t it? The highs are better if you’ve experienced a few lows beforehand.”
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Ratcliffe starts each day with an hour in the gym and celebrated his 60th birthday in 2012 by running the Comrades marathon in South Africa, learning to kite-surf and riding a motorbike across Africa. Aged 64 he completed an Ironman triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile cycle and a marathon run) in 14 hours and 44 minutes. He also funds the Daily Mile, an initiative to get children running, and in 2021 donated £100 million to create a University of Oxford institute to fight the threat of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Ratcliffe has two sons in their thirties, Sam and George, from a ten-year marriage to Amanda Townson, and a teenage daughter, Julia, from a later relationship with Maria Alessia Maresca, an Italian tax lawyer. His partner is Catherine Polli. He splits his time between Hampshire and Monaco, where he moved two years after receiving his knighthood – a decision which attracted criticism, with some claiming he would save £4 billion in tax bills. In response, he points out that he employs thousands of people in the UK and contributes hundreds of millions of pounds to the economy.
He describes himself as “deeply pro-British” in his autobiography, The Alchemists: The Ineos Story, and is alarmed by some of the changes he sees when he returns to the UK. “The National Health Service is broken, it’s not working. We’ve got a police force that’s broken and is not working. We’ve got an education system which is not terrific,” he says. “If I look at other countries that I’ve lived in or have experienced, like America or Switzerland, Germany, France, they’re not in the same mess that the UK is in. There’s no excuse for it, it just needs to be managed competently.”
He owns a beach house overlooking the Solent in Hampshire, an area so close to his heart that he named his superyacht after it; when he traded it for a larger one, he hesitated only briefly before naming it Hampshire II. He also has a home on the shores of Lake Geneva and owns the hotels Lime Wood in the New Forest and Le Portetta in Courchevel, France.
“We’re only here for a short spell, aren’t we?” he says. “I think you have to make the most of it while you’re here. My father used to say: ‘You never regret the things you do, you only regret the things you don’t do.’ I don’t suffer very often from regretting things I don’t do.”
View the full list to see where money was made and lost in the last year
