What is Jeffrey Sprecher's net worth?
Jeffrey Sprecher is an American businessman and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $1 billion. Jeffrey Sprecher is probably best-known for being the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, which is owned by the company Sprecher founded in 2000, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Thanks to Jeffrey's wealth, his wife Kelly Loeffler's net worth made her the richest member of Congress, when she was a Senator. Kelly was appointed to the United States Senate in December 2019 by the Governor of Georgia after Senator Johnny Isakson resigned due to health reasons. She took office in January 2020 and ultimately lost a reelection bid.
Financial Disclosures
When she first joined the Senate, Kelly's federal financial disclosures estimated the Loeffler/Sprecher fortune to be a minimum of $500 million, perhaps as high as $800 million – $1 billion depending on the market value of their stake in ICE. In January 2021 it was confirmed that Sprecher's net worth had officially surpassed $1 billion for the first time.
In the middle of 2020 the company's market cap sunk to around $30 billion. By January 2021, the company's market cap topped $63 billion. At that level, Jeffrey officially became a billionaire.
Early Life
Jeffrey Sprecher was born in Madison, Wisconsin in February 1955. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned his MBA from Pepperdine University. He first worked at Trane and then took a job at Western Power Group, a power plant development firm.
In the mid 1990s, when Jeffrey Sprecher was working for Western Power Group in Los Angeles, he became acquainted with a Georgia-based company called Continental Power Exchange. At the time Continental was owned by MidAmerican Energy Holdings. In 1997 Sprecher negotiated a deal to acquire Continental Power Exchange for $1 plus the assumption of Continental's debt.
Intercontinental Exchange
In 2000 he renamed the company Intercontinental Exchange. Today it's also known as ICE. He founded ICE with seven bank and oil companies as partners. Those partners included BP, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Total, Shell, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale.
His objective was to harness the nascent World Wide Web to build an online exchange for natural gas trading. Jeffrey envisioned a platform where energy traders could buy and sell energy commodities online like the stock market. Eventually his goal evolved into owning many commodity exchanges, from oil to gas to regular stocks.
ICE took off after Enron, which had similar goals, collapsed into bankruptcy in the wake of a massive bankruptcy scandal.
From 2001 onward, ICE became a merger and acquisition machine. ICE acquired dozens of exchanges, large and small. Their exchanges specialized in everything from oil and gas to financials and agriculture.
In 2005 ICE went public. After the first day of trading, Jeffrey's 4.5% stake in the company was worth $10 million.
Today ICE owns and operates 12 regulated exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange. ICE also owns six clearing houses and the cloud-based mortgage finance platform Ellie Mae.
As of this writing ICE has a market cap north of $60 billion.
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Personal Life
In 2002 ICE hired Kelly Loeffler. At some point Kelly and Jeffrey began dating. They married in 2004. Kelly eventually rose the ranks of ICE to become head of marketing, communications and investor relations.
In 2009 Kelly and Jeffrey paid $10.5 million for a 15,000 square-foot mansion in Atlanta's Tuxedo Park neighborhood. The purchase price set the record for most-expensive residential real estate transaction in Atlanta history. They also own at least three homes in Florida, a Chicago condo and a beach house in Georgia that cost $4.3 million.
In 2010 Kelly acquired the Atlanta Dream WNBA team for an undisclosed price.
In 2020 Sprecher Loeffler reportedly sold $20 million worth of stock in companies vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sales reportedly occurred after Kelly learned of COVID's pending economic devastation during private and privileged Senate briefings. Loeffler has denied all wrongdoing.
