Hansjoerg Wyss

About Me

Hansjoerg Wyss' fortune stems from his 2012 sale of medical device manufacturer Synthes, which he founded, to Johnson & Johnson for $20.2 billion. He now holds stakes in publicly traded biotech company NovoCure and the Chelsea Football Club in the U.K. One of the most philanthropic people in the world, Wyss also has charitable foundations with assets of over $2 billion. He is a signatory of the Giving Pledge by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, which asks billionaires to commit to donating at least half of their fortunes to charity. In 2022, he pledged $350 million to the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, where he had already made pledges totaling $381 million since 2009. In 2018, Wyss' foundation pledged $1 billion for conservation efforts over a decade. It upped its pledge to $1.5 billion in 2021.