A root beer stand, five airlines and a chemicals company: the record on Latter-day Saints in business
J. Willard Marriott opened a root beer stand in Washington, D.C., in 1927. David Neeleman has founded five airlines. Jon Huntsman Sr. started a plastics business in 1970 that reported $6.1 billion in revenue in 2023. The pattern is hard to miss, and most of the explanations for it are folklore passed around at conferences. This site keeps the profiles, the essays and the church explainers together, with every figure traced to a page you can open.
Thirty people, and the companies are the point. The Marriotts, father and son: by the time J. Willard Marriott died in 1985 the company ran 1,400 restaurants and 143 hotels on $4.5 billion in annual revenue, and in 2025 Marriott International reported $26.2 billion across 9,361 properties. Ray Noorda, who ran Novell from 1982 to 1994. Alan Ashton, who co-founded WordPerfect and later worked for Novell after it bought the company. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and winner of the 2019 Turing Award. Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma gave every boardroom the word disruption. Kevin Rollins at Dell, Nolan Archibald at Black & Decker, Gary Crittenden as CFO of American Express from 2000 to 2007 and of Citigroup from 2007 to 2009. Larry H. Miller, who owned the Utah Jazz and more than 60 car dealerships. Sheri Dew, chief executive of Deseret Book. Frank VanderSloot of Melaleuca and Josh James, who founded Omniture and then Domo. Gladys Knight with seven Grammys, and Marie Osmond, who helped found the Children's Miracle Network. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman Jr. appear for what they built before they ran for office.
Each profile ends with its sources. Where the record is thin, the profile says so instead of filling the gap.
Why a business reader should bother
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported 17,887,212 members, 32,046 congregations, 211 operating temples and 78,596 full-time missionaries as of December 31, 2025. Its Utah statistics page listed 2,206,370 members in the state when I checked it in September 2026, against a state population of 3,538,904 (2025). Every one of those missionaries spends 18 months or two years, from age 18, in a city and a language the Church picked for them, and the Americans among them pay $400 a month for it. BYU's Marriott School of Business, renamed in 1988 after a $15 million gift from J. Willard and Alice Marriott, teaches about 2,100 undergraduates and 1,200 graduate students and counted more than 55,000 alumni in 2019. That is the pipeline. The essays ask whether it explains anything.
You will read elsewhere that Utah produces a disproportionate share of Fortune 500 chief executives. I have not found anyone who sources that count, so it is not on this site.
How the site is sourced
Two kinds of pages feed this site. Wikipedia articles give each profile its skeleton and point to the primary material, and the primary material itself supplies the flesh: company filings, newspapers, and the Church's own newsroom and statistics pages. A dollar figure without a year does not survive editing. A quotation has to come from a page I read, be attributed, and run under 25 words. The 2012 version of this site, written by a different editor, was not reused; every sentence here dates from the 2026 rewrite. The editorial policy page spells out the rest, including why the domain says Mormon and the text says Latter-day Saint.
How this register is sourced
30 profiles, 14 essays and 13 explainers, with 709 cited sources between them. Every profile links the Wikipedia article and the primary documents it rests on, and says what could not be verified.
The claim gets repeated at every Utah conference and nobody measures it. What the record does show is a run of large companies founded or run by members: Marriott grew from a 1927 root beer stand to 1,400 restaurants and 143 hotels by 1985, JetBlue flew its first passengers on February 11, 2000, and Huntsman Corporation reported $6.1 billion in revenue in 2023. Whether that is a talent, a culture, or a small state with one big university is the question the essays take up.
02
What companies are owned by Mormons
Two different things get mixed up here. Companies founded by members, such as Marriott International, JetBlue, Huntsman Corporation, Novell and WordPerfect, belong to their shareholders, not to the Church. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself owns Deseret Management Corporation, formed in 1966, which holds Deseret Book, the Deseret News, Bonneville International's radio stations, Beneficial Financial Group and Temple Square Hospitality. It also co-developed City Creek Center in Salt Lake City with Simon Property Group, opened on March 22, 2012.
03
Why are there so many Mormon CEOs
Start by noticing that nobody has counted them, so "so many" is an impression, not a statistic. The usual explanations are structural. The Church had 78,596 full-time missionaries in the field on December 31, 2025, each serving two years (men) or 18 months (women) from age 18, a minimum lowered in October 2012. BYU's Marriott School of Business enrolls about 3,300 students and had more than 55,000 alumni in 2019. Add tithing, which trains a household to live on nine-tenths of its income. The essays weigh each of these.
04
Is the Mormon church rich
Rich enough that the question reached the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2019 a former employee of Ensign Peak Advisors, the Church's investment manager, alleged it held about $100 billion. In February 2023 the SEC fined Ensign Peak $4 million and the Church $1 million for failing to disclose equity holdings properly, and its order described a portfolio that grew from $7 billion to about $37.8 billion between 1997 and 2019. Members give one-tenth of their income as tithing, which the Church says funds temples, meetinghouses, missionary work and education.