What Is Andrew Beal's Net Worth?
Andrew Beal is an American banker, businessman, investor, poker player, and amateur mathematician who has a net worth of $15 billion. Based in Dallas, Beal amassed his wealth in banking and real estate, and he is the founder and chairman of Beal Bank, Beal Bank USA, and other affiliated companies.
Beal is a self-taught number theorist, and in 1993, he formulated the Beal conjecture, which is a generalization of Fermat's Last Theorem. He funded a $1 million standing prize for a peer-reviewed proof or disproof (which has stumped mathematicians for decades) of the Beal conjecture. In the early 2000s, Andrew competed against professional poker players in high-stakes poker games in Las Vegas, and in 2004, he won $11.7 million, one of the largest single hands in the history of poker. Author Michael Craig wrote about these games in the 2005 book "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time."
Early Life
Andrew Beal was born Daniel Andrew Beal on November 29, 1952, in Lansing, Michigan. His father worked as a mechanical engineer, and his mother was employed by the state government. Andrew has a younger sister and an older brother, and he started earning money as a teenager by repairing and selling used TVs. Beal attended Lansing Sexton High School, where he was a member of the debate team, and as a high school student, he installed security systems in apartments. Around this time, he also started a house moving business and managed rental properties. After graduating from high school, Andrew studied business administration at Michigan State University. In 1976, he attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, but he left before earning his degree.
Career
Beal has been a real estate investor since the age of 19, when he paid $6,500 for a house in Lansing and began renting it out for $119 per month. He started buying properties, then renovating and selling them, and in 1976, he bid on a Waco apartment building at a Washington, D.C. auction of federal properties. Andrew got the Waco property for $217,500, and sold it for more than $1 million three years later. In the early '80s , Beal and a partner paid $25,000 for two housing project buildings in Newark, New Jersey, called the Brick Towers, and after repairing them, they sold them for $3.2 million. Andrew opened Beal Bank in Dallas in 1988, and as of this writing, there are 19 Beal Bank branches and 21 Beal Bank USA braches. As of the end of 2019, the banks' combined assets were more than $7 billion. Andrew's major businesses include CSG Investments. Inc., CLG Hedge Fund, LLC, and Loan Acquisition Corporation.
In 1997, Andrew launched an aerospace company, Beal Aerospace, in Frisco, Texas, to "build rockets with the goal of placing communications satellites in orbit." Housed in a 163,000 square foot space, Beal Aerospace operated with over 200 employees and focused on a 200-foot-tall rocket that was powered by kerosene and hydrogen peroxide. In March 2000, the company successfully tested the BA-810 Stage 2, the largest liquid rocket engine that had been built since the '60s. After NASA announced its Space Launch Initiative, which would involve funding and developing competing launch vehicles, Andrew announced the closure of Beal Aerospace in October 2000, writing, "NASA has embarked on a plan to develop a 'second generation' launch system that will be subsidized by U.S. taxpayers and that will compete directly with the private sector. In my capacity as founder and chairman of Beal Aerospace, I previously testified to a congressional subcommittee that government subsidies to competing launch providers constituted the private sector's biggest business risk. Nonetheless, NASA remains committed to such an effort, and congress last week approved an initial $290 million to begin an effort that NASA declares will result in the government funding of one or two human rated subsidized launch systems within 5 years. While Beal Aerospace recognizes the need for NASA to develop a human rated launch capability for space station and other human missions, we find it inexcusable and intolerable that NASA intends for these subsidized systems to additionally compete for non-human rated missions including cargo for the space station and commercial satellite missions."
Personal Life
Beal has two children with Susan Kaminski, his first wife, and he has four children with his second wife, Simona, who he married in 1996. In 2010, Simona filed for divorce and asked for $5 billion in damages and $15 billion in exemplary damages. Andrew also has two children with Olya Sinitsyna. Though he is a libertarian, Beal endorsed Republican candidate Rand Paul in the 2016 presidential election, donating $250,000 to his campaign, then he endorsed Donald Trump after Paul dropped out of the race. He served as an economic advisor to Trump's presidential campaign and donated $2 million to a Trump super PAC as well as $1 million toward inaugural festivities. Andrew is an annual title sponsor of the South Nevada Regional Science and Engineering Fair and the Dallas Regional Science and Engineering Fair through his banks, and he donated $1 million to Dallas' Perot Museum of Nature and Science. His companies donated 200+ computers for student use to the Dallas Independent School District.
Real Estate
In 2016, Beal purchased a 27,092 square foot home in Dallas, Texas. The home had been on the market for $100 million. The four-story mansion features a library, bar, solarium, fitness room, 20-seat theater, and a wine room. The 25-acre property includes a 3,347 square foot guesthouse, a 4,836 square foot recreation complex, two outdoor kitchens, a heated pool, a spa, a basketball court, and tennis courts. Andrew listed the home for sale for $48.9 million in early 2017, and it was later auctioned off for $36.2 million.
