Two Players At The PGA Championship This Weekend Are Billionaire Heirs

There is a lot of money on the line at this week's PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club. The total purse is $20.5 million, with a first-place check of $3.69 million.

For most golfers, that would be the kind of payday that changes a career, a bank account, and maybe an entire family tree.

Unless, perhaps, your father co-founded Sun Microsystems. Or your grandfather built one of Norway's largest retail fortunes.

Earlier this weekend, two players with billionaire family connections were hovering near the top of the leaderboard at the PGA Championship: Maverick McNealy and Kristoffer Reitan. By Sunday afternoon, both had faded from realistic contention. McNealy was still hanging around the top 20, while Reitan had fallen much further back. But for a while, the tournament had a fascinating side plot: Two of the golfers chasing one of the most prestigious trophies in the sport were also heirs to enormous family fortunes.

Maverick and Scott McNealy /Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Maverick McNealy

CelebrityNetWorth readers may remember Maverick McNealy from an article we published all the way back in 2014, titled:

"The Richest Person On The Course At This Year's US Open Will Be… A Caddie. Yup. A Caddie."

That caddie was Maverick's father, Scott McNealy.

At the time, Maverick was an 18-year-old Stanford freshman who had qualified for the US Open at Pinehurst. He needed someone he trusted on the bag, so he turned to his dad. That would have been a charming father-son golf story on its own. But Scott was not just any dad. He was the billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Scott helped launch Sun in 1982 and later spent more than two decades as CEO. The company became one of the defining technology firms of the internet era before being sold to Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion. Scott McNealy's net worth is $1 billion.

In 2006, when Maverick was around 11 years old, his parents bought a 13.4-acre estate in Portola Valley, California. Two years later they completed construction on a 21,000-square-foot mansion. The estate features a room dedicated just for making pizza, an indoor gym with a rock-climbing wall, a tennis pavilion, a full-sized hockey rink (Scott is a huge hockey fan), and a 110-yard golf course (which Maverick clearly enjoyed).

In 2018, Scott and Susan listed the estate for $100 million. In 2022, the price was lowered to $54 million. They ultimately accepted $35 million in August 2024. They now live in Nevada. Here's a video tour:

McNealy was once the top-ranked amateur golfer in the world, starred at Stanford, and reportedly considered a business career before turning pro in 2017. Instead of moving into investment banking or Silicon Valley, he chose professional golf. That choice has worked out pretty well.

Still, the family-money contrast is hard to ignore. A $3.69 million PGA Championship winner's check would equal roughly 0.37% of a $1 billion fortune.

Kristoffer Reitan

Kristoffer Reitan's family fortune is even larger.

Reitan is a Norwegian golfer whose grandfather, Odd Reitan, built the retail empire behind Reitan Group, a massive business that includes convenience stores, grocery operations, and other retail holdings across Norway and Europe. The Reitan family fortune has been estimated at roughly $9 billion.

Reitan entered the PGA Championship with fresh momentum. Just before the tournament, he won the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow, earning a reported $3.6 million payday and introducing himself to a much wider American golf audience.

That is an enormous amount of money by any normal standard. But compared to a $9 billion family fortune, $3.6 million equals roughly 0.04%.

In other words, the money was not the real story. The win was.

Reitan's path is also more interesting than simply being labeled a billionaire heir. A few years ago, he was reportedly disillusioned with professional golf and considered stepping away from the sport. His fallback idea was not necessarily joining the family business. It was exploring YouTube golf and trying to make the game feel more fun again.

Instead, he stuck with tournament golf and broke through in a major way.

Not Just Playing With House Money

It would be easy to reduce McNealy and Reitan to their family wealth, but that would be unfair. Golf does not care who your father or grandfather is once you are standing over a six-foot putt on Sunday at a major championship.

Money can buy access, coaching, travel, equipment, and time. It cannot buy a PGA Tour card. It cannot buy a major championship. It cannot keep a tee shot out of the rough.

McNealy and Reitan earned their way onto the leaderboard. Their family fortunes just make the financial backdrop unusually fascinating.