JIM RATCLIFFE

Born in 1952 in Failsworth, Greater Manchester. Working-class family — his father worked at a joinery company.

Ratcliffe was the first in his family to attend university.

After university, he worked at Esso (now ExxonMobil) as a chemical engineer, then moved to Courtaulds and later to Advent International, a private equity firm. At Advent, he learned the buyout playbook.

In 1998, at age 45, he founded INEOS by buying a single chemical plant — the BP Chemicals site in Antwerp — for a relatively small sum. His thesis was simple: big oil and chemical companies were dumping "non-core" chemical assets for cheap because they wanted to focus on upstream oil and gas.

Ratcliffe bought everything they didn't want.

Over the next two decades, INEOS grew through dozens of acquisitions. He bought chemical operations from BP, ICI, Dow Chemical, BASF, and others.

By 2024, INEOS had revenues of $65 billion and 26,000 employees across 29 countries. It's the world's third-largest chemicals company by revenue.

In 2023, he bought a 25% stake in Manchester United for $1.5 billion, taking control of football operations. He also owns OGC Nice (French football), Lausanne-Sport (Swiss football), the INEOS Grenadiers cycling team, and the INEOS Britannia sailing team that competed for the America's Cup.

INEOS is the empire — $65 billion in revenue, making everything from the chemicals in your water pipes to the solvents in your phone screen. He also owns 25% of Manchester United (with control of football operations), OGC Nice, Lausanne-Sport, the Grenadiers cycling team, and several sailing ventures.

He launched the INEOS Grenadier — a 4x4 vehicle designed to replace the Land Rover Defender. The Belstaff fashion brand is his too.

Pure value investing applied to industrial assets. Ratcliffe buys what big corporations don't want.

His edge is operational expertise — he knows how to run chemical plants efficiently because he spent years as a chemical engineer. He doesn't buy to flip.

He buys to operate and improve. It's Warren Buffett's playbook applied to pipes and petrochemicals instead of insurance companies.

INEOS itself. Building a $65 billion revenue company from scratch by age 70 is extraordinary.

But the single best deal was probably the 2005 purchase of Innovene — BP's olefins and derivatives business — for $9 billion. It doubled the size of INEOS overnight and included massive operations across Europe and the US.

Ratcliffe financed it almost entirely with debt and made it work.

The 2008 debt crisis nearly killed INEOS. The company had £7 billion in debt when the financial crisis hit.

Chemical demand collapsed. INEOS came within weeks of bankruptcy.

Ratcliffe had to personally negotiate with 230 banks to restructure the debt. He survived, but it was the closest he ever came to losing everything.

He's said it was the worst period of his professional life.

Buy what nobody wants. Operate it better than the seller did.

Ratcliffe has said repeatedly that the best deals come from corporate divestitures — when a big company decides a division is "non-core" and sells it cheap to clean up the balance sheet. The seller wants it gone.

The buyer gets a working business at a discount. His entire empire was built on this one principle.

Divorced and remarried. Has two sons from his first marriage.

Very private about family life. He's close friends with Sir Ben Ainslie (the sailor) and several cycling figures.

Known as approachable and down-to-earth despite his wealth — colleagues say he still acts like an engineer, not a billionaire.

Grew up in Failsworth, Greater Manchester. Studied chemical engineering at the University of Birmingham.

Later got an MBA from London Business School. The engineering degree is the foundation — he literally understands how the chemical plants he buys actually work.

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