The founder of Patagonia may have once been a billionaire – but it was a label he hated. In fact, Yvon Chouinard, 86, was so enraged when his name was included in the Forbes 2017 billionaire list that he decided to give his company away.
Chouinard may not be a billionaire anymore — having transferred all of his ownership in the outdoor apparel company to a trust and a nonprofit organization — but living frugally does not pose a challenge for him. In fact, he seems to prefer it.
A life of frugality
A lifelong rock climber, Chouinard has spent years sleeping in the wilderness and surviving on bare essentials.
In his 2005 autobiography Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, Chouinard detailed some of the most extreme things he has done to save money – including eating cat food and drinking charcoal water.
The Patagonia founder revealed how, in 1957, he and his friends lived in a hut in Mexico, eating fruit and fish to survive. They used candles from a church to wax their surfboards.
According to a Business Insider report, Chouinard sold climbing equipment from his car to make ends meet before he founded Patagonia in 1973. “The profits were slim, though,” he wrote. “For weeks at a time I’d live on fifty cents to a dollar a day.”
Eating cat food
To save money, he once ate damaged cans of cat food, bought for five cents apiece. When he and a friend spent a summer in the Rockies, their diet consisted of oatmeal, potatoes, ground squirrel, and porcupines they killed with an ice ax.
Chouinard recalled how he and his friends “were always sick from the bad water and couldn’t afford medicine” as they spent their time travelling and rock climbing. They came up with an unusual solution – they would take charcoal from the campfire, mix it with half a cup of salt in a glass of water and drink the mixture to induce vomiting.
Giving away his billions
So when Chouinard became a billionaire with his company, he viewed it not as a milestone or a marker of success, but a “policy failure”.
“It really, really pissed me off,” he said of his inclusion in the Forbes billionaires list in 2017, according to Fortune.
Chouinard wanted off the world’s richest list—but selling Patagonia or taking it public wasn’t an option.
Selling the $3 billion outdoor brand would have left him personally billions richer, the opposite of what he wanted. An IPO was equally out of the question.
So in 2022, Chouinard and his family took a different path: they transferred their shares in Patagonia to a trust and a nonprofit. This structure ensured the company’s roughly $100 million in annual profits would go directly to fighting climate change and protecting wild lands.