When Walmart holds its 55th annual meeting at Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Ark., in early June, the spotlight will be on some familiar topics. CEO Doug McMillon’s keynote address will likely cover the company’s financials and stock price — up more than 130% over the past five years — as well as possibly the company’s controversial step-back on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and how the company is coping with President Trump’s tariffs.
Walmart’s (WMT) spanking new headquarters on roughly 350 acres of land in Bentonville — replete with founder Sam Walton’s plane suspended high above the lobby atrium — may also get a shout-out. There could be entertainment too, like performances by Lizzo and Snoop Dogg in years past.
The billionaire Walton family will be there, and they typically sit in the front row. But one thing McMillon probably won’t talk about is the future of the Walton family’s leadership and its role on the retail giant’s board.
Right now, the Walton clan, which holds just north of 45% of the company’s stock — worth $330 billion-plus as of Thursday, for those keeping score — is led by board chairman Greg Penner. Penner, 55, is married to Carrie Walton Penner, the daughter of former chairman Rob Walton and granddaughter of the Walmart founder.
But in the background, and mostly out of the spotlight, is Steuart Walton, 43, the Sam Walton grandchild destined to oversee the family fortune. He has been on the board without much fanfare since 2016.
And he may be the most important board member anywhere that you have never heard of.
As Steuart Walton’s friend Cyrus Sigari, a board member at composite aircraft maker Game Aerospace, one of Steuart’s other companies, put it: “He’s got a pretty significant responsibility on his shoulders … representing the interests of all shareholders, including his family, … all the while maintaining the cultural heritage and making sure the company is adapting to … a world that’s changing at such a rapid pace.”
Plus, he added, “If you squint and you listen to Steuart talk, you can hear the voice of his grandfather come through.”
So who is Steuart Walton, and why is he so important to Walmart?
Walton told me in a rare interview that being on Walmart’s board of directors is something he always “aspired to do.” And it is something he was destined for, it appears.
Walton was born in 1981 in Bentonville, Ark. — the home of Walmart — to Lynne McNabb Walton and Jim Walton at a time when the discounter produced just $1.6 billion in sales. (Walmart, sitting atop the Fortune 500, notched around $681 billion in sales last year.)
Like many of his kin, Walton worked in the family business. His father, Jim, served on the Walmart board for 11 years. His uncle Rob served as senior vice president and chairman from 1992 to 2025. Another uncle, the late John Walton, was a military Silver Star recipient from his Vietnam War service. He was an avid flier, as was his father, Sam, and was a pilot for the company. Alice Walton, Steuart Walton’s aunt, at one time headed up investments at Arvest Bank Group, which is mostly owned by the family.
Early on, Steuart was involved in the nitty-gritty of retailing that Sam Walton pioneered, just like the tens of thousands of employees who are concerned about tasks like stocking the right kind of crawfish pots. His first job in high school was in the sporting goods department — specifically, fishing products at Walmart store #100 in Bentonville.
“Stocking fishing lures was most of my time spent that summer, so I got actually really good at knowing what … fish were biting and giving advice,” he recalled.
Even through college, Walton was never too far from the family business.
He graduated from the University of Colorado in 2003, where he studied business, and earned a law degree at Georgetown University in 2007. Throughout his studies, he worked as an intern in various Walmart store departments. Remember the VHS tape-to-DVD conversion? Walton was in the thick of it, even going on a buying trip to Hollywood one summer, foreshadowing his interest in technology.
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After law school, his résumé is jam-packed.
He worked with the firm Allen and Overy in the UK and then landed at Walmart’s mergers and acquisition team, where he worked from 2010 to 2012. But then the entrepreneurial spirit of his grandfather kicked in: In 2013, he founded Game Aerospace in the UK. A year later, he settled in Northwest Arkansas, where he eventually opened a Game Aerospace facility and joined the Walmart board.
He wasn’t through. Walton and his brother Tom formed a holding company, Runway Group, which specializes in real estate, hospitality, and outdoor initiatives, as well as RCZ Investments in 2017. He and his brother also purchased the bicycle clothing company, Rapha, for $260 million in 2017.
For someone born to billions, and the grandchild of one of the most famous businesspeople of all time, Walton keeps a low profile. Sure, he married actress Kelly Rohrbach. But he’s no publicity magnet like other wealthy offspring. His profile in the press is minimal. His public appearances are often biking in nature, a passion of Walton’s, in Bentonville’s town square or being seen with his family at the farmer’s market.
From time to time, he is in the spotlight, mostly for his Northwest Arkansas-related initiatives, such as when he interviewed former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for the Heartland Summit, an invite-only event produced by Heartland Forward, an economic think tank focusing on the nation’s central states. (Walton co-founded that too.)
Despite all that, he is a millennial at heart. When we chatted over a Zoom video call a few months ago, he was dressed in clothes that could probably be mistaken for the snazzier apparel assortments at Walmart — a green cycling cap and a casual blue shirt. Behind him was a bookshelf with hats lining the wall, similar to a college dorm room, and what appeared to be trophies for his various cycling accomplishments.
What strikes many people about Walton, though, are the similarities with his grandfather. Like Sam Walton, he comes off as casual and down to earth. But he can command a room as well, his associates say. “He really listens and reflects deeply on the conversation,” board member Marissa Mayer (and former Yahoo CEO) told me.
Said Sigari: “Although I never met Sam, I’ve watched nearly every publicly available video featuring him … they share a similar language, blending a folksy grounded charm with sophisticated insights.” (Walton’s reaction to his friend’s description: “Wow.”)
He’s also an avid flier and even purchased a vintage plane collection from Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen. “My grandfather was a pilot. My dad [and] his siblings were all pilots. My grandmother was a pilot, believe it or not,” Walton said.
But Steuart Walton only has vague memories of his grandfather, who died in April 1992, when he was 11.
“Most of my memories [of him] are sort of grandfatherly,” he said, adding, “Maybe with the exception of him … being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom” by President George H.W. Bush. It wasn’t a long speech, he said. “He finishes it by saying, ‘We’re going to show the world what it’s like to save money and have a better life.’ That is effectively Walmart’s purpose and sort of has been since that time … kind of his parting wisdom and gift to the company.”
Walton also has a lot in common with some other family members, who have been encouraged to follow their various passions outside of the family business.
In 2011, his aunt Alice launched the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, a highly acclaimed modern art museum, in Bentonville. (A destination trip worth taking, by the way.) Walton, alongside his brother Tom and sister-in-law Olivia, also founded a venue called the Momentary, which houses contemporary art and performance spaces. His cousin Lukas founded an environmental sustainability organization called Builders’ Vision, while his late uncle, John, focused on charter schools, among other things.
Walton’s outside ventures have one thing in common. All are “materially relevant to Northwest Arkansas,” he explained.
Said his friend Sigari: “Steuart moved back to the United States from the UK around 2014, a pivotal moment for him personally. Two significant outcomes arose from this move. First, he and his brother made the ambitious decision to transform Bentonville into one of America’s best places to live … [and] being based in Bentonville kept him closely connected to Walmart, drawing him deeper into the company’s operations.”
For example, Walton has made the region into a worldwide destination for cycling, much as Alice Walton has done for Bentonville in the art world. (And soon for medicine, as she welcomes her new medical school’s first class.) Through the creation of hundreds of miles of trails, with the help of $74 million from the family foundation, the brothers worked to build cycling infrastructure in the region. Walmart’s new headquarters, in fact, is accessible by bike through that trail system for the company’s 15,000 Bentonville office workers.
There was also a business purpose to all this.
USA Cycling CEO Brendan Quirk, who worked with the brothers at Runway, explained that the thought was, “If we transform the reputation of this region into becoming known as America’s foremost year-round mountain bike destination, does it become the secret superpower for Northwest Arkansas in attracting families and talented professionals to the region?”
“Whenever you look at people moving from Silicon Valley here, whenever you see people moving from both the East and West Coast to Arkansas,” former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchison told Yahoo Finance, “they’re coming here because it is an ecosystem of economic growth and technology companies, and that is a tribute to much of … the vision that Steuart had for this region, and he understood that it starts with the quality of life, the capital, and then the community.”
In other words: Give potential employees something to do and they will come.
The Walton family, which has owned a controlling interest in the company since it went public in 1970, has a number of roles on the board, primarily as stewards of the family fortune. There have always been up to three family members on the board, with the purpose of keeping, as one observer said, a “watchful eye” on the company.
While “not actively managing the day to day, they need to oversee the operations and ensure that things are trending in the right direction … and how to spend and allocate capital,” said longtime retail analyst Joe Feldman of Telsey Advisory Group. “Hiring the right people to run the company is … crucial, probably the first priority,” he added, followed by “succession planning.”
CEO Doug McMillon told Yahoo Finance that having such active family members on the board is a “huge advantage and very positive.” “I’m grateful for it” and for “having a big shareholder that is long-term oriented,” he said.
Former Walmart International CEO Judith McKenna said: “They are good stewards of it and they also happen to be big shareholders. Bringing all those things together was for me very helpful to have … people on the board who are aligned to what the mission is.”
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Out of eight grandchildren and their spouses, Steuart Walton was chosen as the next generation’s Walton family member to oversee Walmart’s board. But he didn’t immediately get the rubber stamp.
“The family has an internal governance process,” Walton said. “Raising your hand is kind of the first step. Then, there’s a number of things that you have to do to be sort of [be] qualified or approved, and I was kind of going through that process for a number of years.”
“The Walton family has an impressive protocol for developing family members who either want to have roles at the company or roles on the board,” explained Marissa Mayer, who has been on the board since 2012. “They are screened. They’re given workshops. They get management coaching. They [get] graduate degrees … law degrees, MBAs, really studying business. The chops that they bring to the board room, in terms of their background when they are brought forward … are substantial.”
Mayer sits on the committee that Walton chairs: technology and e-commerce. By the time Walton joined the board in 2016, she said he was a longtime follower of the business and had prepared “for that role for years before he was formally nominated.”
He was not the only family member to show interest, she added.
It will be a number of years if and when Steuart Walton takes over the chairman’s role, much like his grandfather and his uncle Rob did years ago. Greg Penner, who worked at Walmart for 20 years and also owns the NFL’s Denver Broncos with his father-in-law, Rob, and wife, Carrie, among others, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. He became chairman in 2015 after Rob Walton stepped aside.
But this much is clear: Steuart Walton’s role as lead of the technology committee will be central to the company as it battles Amazon (AMZN) for retail supremacy.
“The company’s largest competitor is Amazon, and we’re in a space where, even though we started as a bricks-and-mortar retailer, we’re a tech company, and we need to work like a tech company and think like a tech company,” Mayer said.
Walton is helping guide a company that is both similar to and different from the one his grandfather created. Different in that Sam Walton didn’t have to deal with a company like Amazon and its nearly $2 trillion market cap nipping at his heels. (You could argue Sears and Kmart had already peaked.) Nor did he have to pay store managers upward of $600,000-plus a year to make sure those fishing lures were in stock. Or fret about DEI.
As Wall Street’s Feldman and others point out, the biggest challenges include staying ahead of the runaway train known as artificial intelligence, dealing with the new world of Trump tariffs, and navigating nonstop culture wars.
And then there’s the matter of getting your head around managing a business with 2.1 million workers and some 10,500 stores and warehouse clubs. And everything that goes along with that, said Walton— from buying to shipping and getting the merchandise on the shelves. Plus, “the myriad other things” that come with operating a mega-retailer. “It’s everything from legal to real estate to finance to, you name it on down the list.”
“It’s mind-boggling,” he added, “every time you sort of think about all the people doing all this work, day in, day out.”
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Brooke DiPalma is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X at @BrookeDiPalma or email her at [email protected].
Special thanks: Grace O’Donnell, David Foster, Brent Sanchez, and Brian Sozzi
The post Meet Walmart heir Steuart Walton, the most powerful board member you’ve never heard of appeared first on Yahoo Finance.
