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Avery Hartmans and Jordan Hart
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- Amancio Ortega, the 88-year-old Spanish founder of Zara, is worth around $108 billion.
- He owns 59% of Inditex, the world's largest clothing retailer, which also sells brands like Bershka.
- Here's how Ortega built a fast-fashion empire and became one of the world's wealthiest moguls.
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Amancio Ortega, the man behind fashion brand Zara, is Spain's richest person.
His retail empire Inditex helped Ortega build his $108 billion fortune, and he also invests his earnings into an expansive commercial real estate portfolio that includes office and residential buildings around the world.
Ortega rarely grants interviews. He stepped back from company operations in 2011, but his family is still heavily involved with Inditex. His daughter, Marta Ortega Perez, is the non-executive chair; his son-in-law, Carlos Torretta, has held the role of head of communications at Zara; and his brothers-in-law have worked as managing directors at Inditex-owned brands, according to the Financial Times.
Here's a look at the life and career of the cofounder of Zara.
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The 88-year-old Ortega was born in northwestern Spain in 1936, the son of a railroad worker and a stay-at-home mother.
He started making clothes with his siblings and future wife, Rosalia Mera, in their home in the early 1960s. In 1975, Ortega and Mera opened the first Zara store in downtown La Coruna, Spain, according to Bloomberg.
"Zara" wasn't his first choice for the store's name.
He was planning to name it Zorba after the film "Zorba the Greek," but there was already a local bar with the same name. Because he'd already bought molds of the letters Z-O-R-B-A, he made do with what he had and ended up with the name Zara, Vogue India reported.
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Ten years later, in 1985, Ortega incorporated Zara into a holding company called Inditex.
He and Mera separated around that time, but she remained the company's second-largest shareholder until her death in 2013.
Ortega owns 59% of Inditex, which is now the world's largest clothing retailer, according to Bloomberg. Inditex owns a portfolio of fast-fashion brands, including Zara, one of the best-known and most successful fashion brands in the world with nearly 3,000 stores in 96 countries, according to Forbes.
Pull&Bear, a teen-focused retailer, is also owned by Inditex.
Pull&Bear was started in 1991, according to the official company website. Other Inditex brands include Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, and Zara Home. Bershka was its second-biggest brand by revenue in fiscal 2023.
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Mera and Ortega's daughter, Sandra Ortega Mera, inherited the title of Spain's richest woman after her mother's death in 2013.
In August 2013, Ortega's ex-wife, who had become Spain's richest woman, died at age 69. Their daughter has an estimated $9.7 billion net worth and controls 4.5% of Inditex, though she's not involved in the company. She's the second-richest person in Spain behind her father, according to Forbes.
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Ortega has been married to his second wife, Flora Perez, since 2001.
Ortega and Perez share two children, including a daughter, Marta, who began in the family business nearly 16 years ago, according to the Financial Times. She married top Spanish equestrian Sergio Álvarez Moya in February 2012, but the couple separated in 2015. In November 2018, Marta married Carlos Torretta — then a model agent and the son of designer Roberto Torretta — at her family's home in Galicia, Spain, W Magazine reported.
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Marta Ortega was long considered a favorite to follow in her father's footsteps and lead Inditex.
Amancio Ortega stepped down as Inditex's chairman in 2011 and handed the reins to executive president Pablo Isla, but in 2022, Marta Ortega took over as Inditex's chairwoman.
These days, Amancio Ortega is the 13th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of about $108 billion, according to Forbes.
Since Inditex's initial public offering in 2001, Ortega has received more than 12 billion euros, or about $13 billion, in dividends. Most of that cash has been reinvested in real estate through his company's investment arm, Pontegadea, per Bloomberg.
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In 2011, he bought the tallest skyscraper in Spain at the time, the 515-foot Torre Picasso in Madrid, for 400 million euros.
It was his first big real estate purchase, Reuters reported. The office building was the tallest in Spain at the time, but it's now the tenth-tallest building in the country.
And in 2016, he purchased another Madrid skyscraper, Cepsa Tower, for 490 million euros.
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In 2015, he paid $370 million for an entire block of prime property in Miami Beach, Miami Herald reported.
Ortega has also invested in the Epic Residences and Hotel, a luxurious, 54-story skyscraper in Miami. He's also reportedly bought property in London, Chicago, Barcelona and more, according to Forbes.
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In 2015, he bought the historic E.V. Haughwout Building in New York City's SoHo for $145 million.
Reuters reported that Ortega held around $6.6 billion in real estate assets by the end of 2015. Ortega picked up another New York property in 2016, this time a hotel at 70 Park Avenue in Murray Hill for $67.6 million, according to The Real Deal.
In 2019, Ortega went on a further real estate spending spree.
He acquired a downtown Chicago hotel for $72.5 million, as well as a building in central Washington D.C. and two office buildings in Seattle that Amazon had leased, for a combined $1.1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
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Ortega also owned an $84 million superyacht named Drizzle, but he reportedly put it up for sale in 2022.
Auto Evolution reported that Ortega was able to sell Drizzle for around 76 million euros, and he'll be trading it in for a larger vessel. But he rarely jets off on vacation anyway — in fact, Ortega didn't take his first vacation until 2001, after Inditex's initial public offering, per Bloomberg.
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Ortega is known for being low-key, as executives go.
Bloomberg reported in 2012 that he eschewed an office to sit among the designers and fabric experts at Zara's headquarters, while another report said he typically ate lunch with his employees in the company cafeteria every day.
Ortega sticks to a simple uniform of a shirt and slacks and doesn't typically wear clothes from his own companies. In his free time, Ortega is often seen at equestrian events. He also built an equestrian center near La Coruna, as his daughter Marta competes in show jumping, according to Bloomberg.
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In 2017, his foundation donated $344 million to Spanish public hospitals to provide the latest technology in breast cancer screening and treatment.
Ortega founded the Amancio Ortega Foundation in 2001, a charitable organization focused on education and social welfare.
In 2020, Ortega donated roughly $68 million to help combat the pandemic, including buying ventilators, face masks, and COVID tests for the Spanish Health System, Barron's reported.
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Despite running a major fashion retailer for four decades, Ortega is intensely private.
There were no public photographs of him until 1999, and in 2012, Bloomberg noted that he had only ever granted interviews to three journalists.
One Zara employee who worked with him told The Economist in 2016 that "the true story of Amancio Ortega has not been told."
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Inditex has grown into a fast-fashion behemoth.
Although it's facing tough competition, Inditex grew its revenue 1o.4% in 2023 to 39.5 billion euros.
Óscar García Maceiras has served as the CEO of Inditex since 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Katie Warren, Ashley Lutz, Mallory Schlossberg, and Melissa Wiley contributed to an earlier version of this story. Correction: March 27, 2023 – An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of money that Amancio Ortega donated to combat the pandemic. He donated roughly $68 million.
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