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American sports team owner (born 1949)
John William Henry II is an American businessman and the founder of John W. Henry & Company, an investment management firm. He is the principal owner of Liverpool Football Club, the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Penguins, The Boston Globe, and co-owner of RFK Racing. As of October 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth to be US$5.7 billion.
Henry was born to John William Henry Sr. and Lois Henry (née Osborne) on September 13, 1949, in Quincy, Illinois. His parents were soybean farmers, and he split his time growing up between Illinois and Arkansas. At age 15, his asthmatic condition prompted his family to move to Apple Valley, California, where Henry attended and graduated from Victor Valley High School in Victorville, California. Henry then attended but did not graduate from four separate colleges and universities, Victor Valley College, and then University of California, Riverside, University of California, Irvine, and UCLA, where he majored in philosophy. He attributes not graduating to the time he spent performing and touring with two bands, Elysian Fields and Hillary.
In May 2007, Henry filed for divorce in Florida from second wife, Peggy Sue Henry. Court documents showed that she had asked for child support and alimony, and disputed her husband's claim that he couple had prenuptial agreement. The two had been married for 13 years, and had a daughter. Also in 2007, Henry bought the Brookline home of Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He had the home demolished and replaced it with a 35,000-square-foot mansion. In 2009, Henry married Linda Pizzuti, a 30-year-old real estate developer. As of early 2012, the couple had a daughter and a son. In 2018, Henry put up for sale, for $25 million, an estate in Boca Raton, Florida, where he had built a primary residence, completed in 1995, and renovated in 2014. In 2019, the selling price of the 41,010-square-foot home was reduced in 2019, to $15 million. Henry enjoys playing baseball simulation games, including Out of the Park Baseball.
Henry started trading corn and soybean futures to learn the basics of hedging the price risk of holding an inventory of these commodities, whether in storage or out in the field. In 1976, a commodities broker at Reynolds Securities asked him to advise other farmers, but he declined. After spending a summer in Norway with his first wife, Mai, Henry developed a mechanical trend following method for managing a futures trading account. He tested his trend-reversal method—which was never out of the market but always held a position (either long or short) in every one of the markets in the account's "basket" of commodities—"using his own money," according to his marketing materials from 1983. When that test proved successful, he founded John W. Henry & Company in 1981, opened a small office across the street from the airport in Irvine, California, and began marketing his management to the largest commodity brokerage firms in America. That proved so successful by 1983 that he moved to considerably larger quarters at Fashion Island in Newport Beach. In 1989, Henry moved to Westport, Connecticut.
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