No fewer than three Nigerians have made it to the Forbes List of the most powerful, impactful and wealthiest Black Americans in 2024.
The Nigerians on the list are Wemimo Abbey, Tope Awotona and Adebayo Ogunlesi, all based in the United States.
Abbey, 32, is the Cofounder and Co-CEO, Esusu, a New York fintech startup that helps renters build their credit histories and scores by reporting rent payments to credit bureaus.
According to Forbes, more than 20,000 properties currently offer Esusu’s service and some 1.8 million Americans have used Esusu to record a rent payment.
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.
Report has it that his Nigerian mother sold her wedding ring to fund his travel and education in the US.
Awotona, 43, is the Founder and CEO, Calendly, a scheduling software startup which private investors valued at $3 billion in 2021.
At the age of 15, Awotona moved to Atlanta from Lagos where he was born. He 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.
Adebayo Ogunlesi, 70, is the Chairman, co-Founder Global Infrastructure Partners, a 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.
Others in the list of wealthiest black Americans include Dr Dre, Lebron James, Michael Jordan, Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Gary Linnen, to mention a few.