Wes Edens is an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman. He is a co-founder of the company known as Fortress Investment Group. Wes Edens has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion and is also considered one of the wealthiest people in Illinois, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.
Edens received his bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University, where he majored in finance and earned minors in accounting and business administration. He went to Oregon State University in 1976 after graduating high school at Palo Alto High School in California.
In 1982, Edens returned to Oregon State University for postgraduate education as an investment adviser and graduated as a Certified Investment Management Analyst. After that, he worked at several companies that included the management of financial assets, including money management. Later, he founded Fortress Partners in 1998, and the same year he was asked to create a record-breaking private equity fund that was more than six times the size of previous private equity funds.
In 1998, Edens co-founded Fortress Investment with his friend Randal Nardone, a lawyer and tax accountant. The company was initially known as Fortress Paper and specialized in the management of paper assets. In 1999, the company’s management group decided to expand its business by managing private equity assets, thus making it one of the biggest private equity firms in the United States.
Fortress Investment Group is currently ranked as one of the most significant hedge funds in the United States, being one of only eight hedge funds with $60 billion or more under management.
Wes Edens has been named one of “The Best CEOs of 2007″ by BusinessWeek, and he was also named to the list of “Fortune’s Forty Under 40” for 2008. Between 2007 and 2009, he appeared on lists of Forbes as one of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women,” along with Oprah Winfrey and Meg Whitman. Wes Edens was listed as the 34th richest person in Illinois.