Background and career
Stephan Ernst Schmidheiny (born 29 October 1947) is a Swiss billionaire, businessman, industrialist and philanthropist. He is primarily known for his work at Eternit as well as his legal cases involving convictions of manslaughter. As of 2026, none of the convictions are currently enforceable.
Schmidheiny was born 29 October 1947 in Balgach, Switzerland to Max Schmidheiny and Adda Scherrer. His great-grandfather, Jacob Schmidheiny, who hailed from Balgach, made a fortune through building materials and industrial manufacturing later being known as Eternit and Holcim. Schmidheiny completed his Law studies with a PhD at the University of Zurich in 1972.
In 1972, Schmidheiny started his business career at Eternit. In 1976, at the age of 29, he was named CEO of the Swiss Eternit Group. According to his brother Thomas Schmidheiny, their father Max Schmidheiny decided to divide his industrial empire into two halves: asbestos for Stephan, cement for Thomas. As a result of this split of activities, Schmidheiny inherited Eternit. While Schmidheiny withdrew from asbestos production and Eternit, he invested in new industrial segments, building up a multinational conglomerate of shareholdings by adding enterprises in the areas of forestry, banking, consumer goods, power generation, as well as electronic and optical equipment. In 1985, Schmidheiny supported Nicolas Hayek in his bid for the Swiss watch holding company Société de Microélectronique et d'Horlogerie(SMH), which resulted in the rescue of the Swiss watch industry. Later from this alliance, the present day Swatch Group was formed.
Schmidheiny is an advocate and leader in the field of sustainable development. He served as adviser on sustainability to the United Nations as well as to the OECD. In the 1980s he created FUNDES, an organization that supports the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in several Latin American countries. According to recent Swiss accounts, Schmidheiny began buying Chilean forest land in 1982, and he now owns over 120,000 hectares in Southern Chile, near Concepción, land which the Mapuche Indians claim has been theirs since time immemorial. The Mapuche charge that some of the land Schmidheiny bought was stolen from them during the Pinochet dictatorship, using that regime's standard techniques of intimidation, torture, and murder. In March 2019, two months before his conviction on two counts of involuntary manslaughter, Forbes included Schmidheiny in its list of the world's most generous philanthropists outside of the US.
Following his involvement in the Rio Summit, Schmidheiny authored the book Change of Course: Global Business Prospects for Development and the Environment, published by MIT Press in 1992. His book offers an extensive analysis of how businesses can make sustainable development their focus, his book has been translated into fifteen languages. He also contributed to Financing Change: The Financial Community, Eco-efficiency, and Sustainable Development also published by MIT Press.
In the 1990s Schmidheiny established the Fundación Avina , which contributes to sustainable development in Latin America by encouraging productive alliances among social and business leaders and today is a leading player in that field. The foundation pioneered a South American microfinance system similar to that of Muhammad Yunus whose widely praised system benefits the citizens of Bangladesh.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
