When Walmart holds its 55th annual meeting in early June at the Bud Walton Stadium in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the spotlight will be on some familiar topics. CEO Doug McMillon’s keynote will likely cover the company’s financials and stock price — up more than 130% over the past five years — as well as its controversial rollbacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and how it’s dealing with President Trump’s tariffs.
Walmart’s ( WMT ) brand-new headquarters on about 350 acres in Bentonville — with founder Sam Walton’s plane hanging high above the lobby’s atrium — is also likely to be well-received. There will also likely be entertainment, such as performances from Lizzo and Snoop Dogg in past years.
The billionaire Walton family will be in attendance, and they typically sit in the front row. But McMillon likely won’t talk about the Waltons’ future leadership and their role on the retail giant’s board.
The Walton family currently owns more than 45% of the company, which was worth more than $330 billion as of Thursday. The family is led by Greg Penner, chairman of the board. Penner, 55, is married to Carrie Walton Penner, daughter of former chairman Rob Walton and granddaughter of Walmart’s founder.
But behind the scenes, largely out of the public eye, is Stuart Walton, 43, grandson of Sam Walton and destined to run the family fortune. He has been a low-key member of the board since 2016.
As Stuart Walton’s friend Cyrus Sigaly, a board member of composite aircraft maker Game Aerospace (another of Stuart’s companies), puts it, “He has a pretty big responsibility…to represent the interests of all shareholders, including his family…while maintaining the cultural legacy and making sure the company adapts to…this rapidly changing world.”
Besides, he adds, “if you squint and listen to Stuart, you can hear his grandfather’s voice.”
So who is Stuart Walton? And why is he so important to Walmart?
Retail Destiny
In a rare interview, Walton told me that being on the Walmart board was something he had always “desired.” It seemed destined for him, too.
Walton was born in 1981 in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered, to Lynne McNabb Walton and Jim Walton. At the time, the discount store had sales of just $1.6 billion. (Walmart, which tops the Fortune 500 list, had sales of about $681 billion last year.)
Like many of his relatives, Walton is involved in the family business. His father, Jim, served on Walmart’s board for 11 years. His uncle, Rob, was senior vice president and chairman of Walmart from 1992 to 2025. Another uncle, the late John Walton, served in the Vietnam War and was awarded the Silver Star. He, like his father, Sam, loved flying and was a pilot for the Walton Company. Stuart Walton’s aunt, Alice Walton, ran the investment business for Arvest Bank Group, which is mostly owned by the Walton family.
Stuart was involved early in the minutiae of the retail business that Sam Walton pioneered, like thousands of employees who were concerned with tasks such as how to find the right inventory for the crawfish pots. His first job in high school was in the sporting goods department—specifically, fishing supplies at Walmart Store No. 100 in Bentonville.
“I spent most of that summer laying out bait, so I got pretty good at knowing what fish were biting and giving advice,” he recalls.
Even in college, Walton never strayed far from the family business.
He graduated from the University of Colorado in 2003 with a business major and earned his law degree from Georgetown University in 2007. While in school, he interned at various Walmart stores. Remember the switch from VHS tapes to DVDs? Walton was in that phase, even going on a sourcing trip to Hollywood one summer, foreshadowing his interest in technology.
After law school, he had an extensive resume.
He worked at the U.K. law firm Allen and Overy before joining Walmart’s mergers and acquisitions team, where he worked from 2010 to 2012. But then his grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit began to show: In 2013, he founded Game Aerospace in the U.K. A year later, he settled in northwest Arkansas, where he eventually opened a Game Aerospace factory and joined Walmart’s board of directors.
He’s not done yet. Walton and his brother Tom formed a holding company, Runway Group, in 2017, which focuses on real estate, hospitality and outdoor projects, as well as RZC Investments. He and his brother also acquired cycling apparel company Rapha for $260 million in 2017.
Like grandfather, like grandson?
As a billionaire and the grandson of one of the most famous business leaders of all time, Walton keeps a low profile. Sure, he’s married to actress Kelly Rohrbach. But he doesn’t have the same exposure as other second-generation rich people. His media exposure is very low. His public appearances are usually riding in nature in the Bentonville Town Square – one of Walton’s hobbies – or visiting farmers markets with his family.
He is in the spotlight from time to time, mainly for his initiatives in Northwest Arkansas, such as his interview with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Heartland Summit. The Heartland Summit is an invitation-only event hosted by Heartland Forward, an economic think tank focused on the middle states of the United States. (Walton is also a co-founder of the think tank.)
Still, he is a millennial at heart. When we chatted over a Zoom video call a few months ago, he was wearing an outfit that could have been mistaken for something more fashionable at Walmart—a green cycling cap and a blue casual shirt. Behind him was a bookshelf, a wall filled with hats, like something in a college dorm, and what looked like trophies for his various cycling achievements.
What strikes me most about Walton, however, is his resemblance to his grandfather. Like Sam Walton, he has an easygoing, down-to-earth vibe. But he can also take charge, his colleagues say. “He really listens and thinks deeply about the conversation,” board member Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO, told me.
“Although I’ve never met Sam, I’ve watched nearly every publicly available video of him,” Sigari said. “They speak a similar language, a combination of down-to-earth charm and profound insights.” (Walton’s reaction to his friend’s description: “Wow.”)
He was also a keen pilot, even buying a fleet of vintage planes from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “My grandfather was a pilot. My father and his brothers and sisters were all pilots. Believe it or not, my grandmother was a pilot, too,” Walton said.
But Stuart Walton has only vague memories of his grandfather, who died in April 1992 when he was 11.
“Most of my memories of him are grandfather-like,” he said, adding, “except maybe for him … being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H.W. Bush.” The speech wasn’t long, he said. “He ended by saying, ‘We’re going to show the world what it’s like to save money and live a better life.’ That was actually what Walmart was all about, and it’s been like that ever since … kind of his dying words and gift to the company.”
A Northwest Arkansas connection
Walton also has a lot in common with some of the other family members, all of whom were encouraged to pursue their various interests outside of the family business.
In 2011, his aunt Alice founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, a highly acclaimed modern art museum in Bentonville. (It’s a destination worth visiting, by the way.) Walton also founded a venue called Momentary, which houses a contemporary art and performance space, with his brother Tom and sister-in-law Olivia. His cousin Lucas founded an environmental sustainability organization called Builders’ Vision, while his late uncle John focused on projects such as charter schools.
Walton’s foreign investments have one thing in common. All of them, he explains, are “substantially connected to Northwest Arkansas.”
“Stuart’s move back to the U.S. from England around 2014 was a pivotal moment for him personally,” says his friend Sigary. “Two big things came out of that move. First, he and his brother made an ambitious decision to make Bentonville one of the best places to live in the U.S.… [and] being based in Bentonville has kept him connected to Walmart and allowed him to be more deeply involved in the company.”
For example, the Waltons have made Bentonville a global cycling destination, much as Alice Walton did for Bentonville’s art community. (Soon, as she welcomes the first students to her new medical school, the Waltons will also bring cycling to Bentonville’s medical community.) With $74 million in funding from their family foundation, the Waltons have built hundreds of miles of bike paths and are committed to building biking infrastructure in the region. In fact, Walmart’s new headquarters will be accessible by bike to the company’s 15,000 Bentonville office employees via this system of bike paths.
There’s also a business purpose to all this.
Brendan Quirk, CEO of USA Bicycling, who worked with the Runway brothers, explained that the idea was, “If we transform this region’s reputation as the premier year-round mountain biking destination in the country, could it be the secret superpower for Northwest Arkansas to attract families and professionals to the region?”
“Whenever you see people moving here from Silicon Valley, whenever you see people moving to Arkansas from the East Coast and the West Coast, they’re coming here because there’s an ecosystem of economic growth and tech companies, and that’s largely due to Stuart’s vision for the region, who understood that it all starts with quality of life, the capital, and then the community,” former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchison told Yahoo Finance.
In other words: Give potential employees something to do, and they will come.
Board Seat or Bankruptcy
The Walton family has held a controlling stake in the company since it went public in 1970 and has served on the board in a number of roles, primarily responsible for the management of the family’s wealth. The board, which typically has a maximum of three members, is designed to keep a “close eye” on the company, as one observer put it.
Joe Feldman, a longtime retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, said that while “they don’t actively manage day-to-day, they need to oversee operations and make sure things are going in the right direction… and how money is being spent and allocated.” He added: “Hiring the right people to run the company… is critical and probably the top priority,” 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 that,” he said, as well as “having a large shareholder who is looking at the long term.”
“They are great managers and they are also large shareholders,” said Judith McKenna, former CEO of Walmart International. “It was very helpful for me to combine all of those factors… to have people on the board who were aligned with our mission.”
Of the eight grandchildren and their spouses, Stuart Walton was chosen to be the next generation of the Walton family to oversee Walmart’s board. But he wasn’t immediately approved.
“We have an internal governance process in our family,” Walton said. “Raising your hand is the first step. Then you have to do a lot of things to get qualified or approved, and I went through that process for several years.”
“The Walton family has an impressive program for developing family members who want to serve in the company or on the board,” explained Marissa Mayer, who has been a board member since 2012. “They go through screening. They go to seminars. They go through management training. They get graduate degrees… law degrees, MBAs, really learn about business. When they are promoted to the board, they bring… tremendous potential to the board in terms of their background.”
Mayer is a member of the technology and e-commerce committee, which Walton chairs. She said Walton was a longtime follower of the company when he joined the board in 2016 and had been preparing for the position “for several years before he was officially nominated.”
He’s not the only family member to have expressed interest, she added.
Challenging future
If Stuart Walton takes over as chairman, as his grandfather and uncle Rob did years ago, it will take several years. Greg Pena, who has worked at Walmart for 20 years and also co-owns the NFL’s Denver Broncos with his father-in-law Rob and his wife Kelly, doesn’t seem to be leaving. He took over as chairman in 2015 after Rob Walton stepped down.
But one thing is clear: Stuart Walton’s role as chairman of the technology committee will be critical to Walmart as it battles for retail supremacy with Amazon (AMZN).
“The company’s biggest competitor is Amazon, and even though we started as a brick-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 lead a company that’s both similar to and different from the one his grandfather founded. The difference is that Sam Walton doesn’t have to deal with the likes of Amazon, which is nipping at its heels with a market cap of nearly $2 trillion. (You could say Sears and Kmart have peaked.) He doesn’t have to pay store managers up to $600,000 a year to make sure the bait is in stock. Nor does he have to worry about retailers going bankrupt.
As Feldman and others on Wall Street have pointed out, the biggest challenges include staying ahead of the runaway train of artificial intelligence, navigating the new world of Trump’s tariffs, and dealing with the nonstop culture wars.
Then you have to figure out how to manage a business with 2.1 million employees and about 10,500 stores and warehouse-style stores. There’s all the pieces involved, Walton said—from sourcing to shipping to getting merchandise on the shelves. Plus, there’s the “countless other things” that come with running a big-box retailer. “It’s everything from law to real estate to finance.”
“It’s incredible,” he added. “It’s incredible to think about the people who do these jobs day in and day out.”
