Mullingar man and Ryanair CEO, Michael O’Leary, has joined Ireland’s elite billionaire circle for the first time, according to last weekend’s Sunday Independent Rich List.
The 55-year-old joins 13 other individuals and families with billionaire status in Ireland, with an estimated wealth of €1.08 billion.
The aviation tycoon was conditionally awarded 5m stock options in December 2014 as part of a new five-year contract; these are potentially worth up to €75 million.
Mr. O’ Leary who once said, “I live in Mullingar, what the hell do I want with the sights of the world?”, grew up on a farm in Mullingar. The second child and first son in a family of six, after leaving university, he owned his own shop in Crumlin, where he boasts about doubling the price of batteries when he opened on Christmas Day. He worked for Tony Ryan, the founder of Ryanair, and turned the company from spluttering wreck to soaring success.
He has a large UK commercial property portfolio, owning two office blocks in the centre of London as well as other buildings and has spent heavily to become the biggest national hunt horse-owner in the country and owns racehorses at his Gigginstown House Stud, part of his estate near Mullingar,
In 2003, he married Anita Farrell and the couple have three small children. O’Leary commutes each day to Dublin airport in his much-famed taxi. The family live in an extensively-renovated country pile at Gigginstown in Westmeath, and owns a house bought for €9.4 million on Raglan Road and a Newmarket stud farm.
Meanwhile, One Direction star and fellow Mullingar man, Niall Horan, has also moved up the list, coming in at a respectable €51 million. Forbes Magazine estimated that Horan and his fellow band members earned €119.4 million last year, thanks to a gruelling world tour, playing 74 concerts, each grossing well over €71 million, not to mention hundreds of thousands in merchandising. Horan is also listed as being the owner of €1.8 million home in Hertfordshire, as well as a Los Angeles mansion close to socialite Kim Kardashian.
