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The list of the most powerful, impactful and wealthiest Black Americans for 2024.
Adebayo Ogunlesi
A native of Nigeria and now a U.S. citizen, Ogunlesi is a cofounder of New York-based private equity firm Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). In October, GIP was acquired by BlackRock for $12.5 billion in cash and shares, with Ogunlesi remaining chairman and CEO of GIP. Today, Forbes estimates Ogunlesi-who earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford, a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, and an MBA from Harvard Business School-has a net worth of $1.7 billion. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the early 1980s, Ogunlesi worked as an attorney at the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Prior to cofounding GIP in 2006, Ogunlesi spent more than 20 years as an investment banker at Credit Suisse.
Tope Awotona
Awotona is the founder and CEO of the scheduling software startup Calendly, which private investors valued at $3 billion in 2021. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Awotona moved to Atlanta when he was 15, and studied computer science at the University of Georgia before switching majors to business and management information. After working as a salesman for several tech firms and launching a few failed startups, Awotona cashed in his 401(k) in 2013 to found Calendly because he was frustrated with the number of emails it required to schedule meetings.
After bootstrapping the company for several years, in 2021 Awotona raised $350 million to further scale Calendly. Today, he is worth an estimated $1.4 billion.
Wemimo Abbey
Abbey is cofounder and co-CEO of Esusu, a New York fintech startup that helps renters build their credit histories and scores by reporting rent payments to credit bureaus. More than 20,000 properties currently offer Esusu’s service and some 1.8 million Americans have used Esusu to record a rent payment. The startup also recently launched a direct-to-consumer product, MyEsusu, through which consumers can build credit and monitor their credit scores. In early 2022, Esusu raised $130 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. Before founding Esusu, Abbey, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, worked as a mergers and acquisitions consultant at PWC and cofounded a non-profit and a data analytics startup.
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