[W]hen a team of reporters from Forbes magazine went looking for the richest person in every state, they found billionaires in every state except six: Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Vermont.
Vermont’s richest man, says Forbes in its June 21 story, is John Abele, who founded the medical device company Boston Scientific and has an estimated net worth of $640 million.
Boston Scientific, founded in 1979, went public in 1992. Abele, who now lives in Shelburne, made the Forbes 400 in 1996 as a billionaire, but he has donated much of his original fortune, says Forbes. Abele is 82, according to Forbes.
In 1997, Abele founded the Argosy Foundation, which is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and which reported that in 2017 it granted $6.7 million to help organizations around the country that work in the arts, homelessness, reproductive rights, and environmental protection. Abele’s LinkedIn page says the Argosy Foundation has given more than $100 million in grants to hundreds of nonprofits.
In 2017, the foundation’s Vermont grantees included United Way of Northwest Vermont, the University of Vermont, the Vermont Humanities Council, the Shelburne Museum, the Vermont Foodbank, and CarShare Vermont.
“With a new and often unpredictable administration — and a cultural divide seemingly growing by the day — many of our partners found themselves navigating rough waters while trying to attend to the needs of the communities they serve,” the foundation said in its most recently available annual report.
“Many have had to continuously restrategize their programming in order to account for sudden changes from a variety of fronts – from harsh immigration policies to teen pregnancy prevention program cuts to the loss of environmental protections and more.”
Abele in 2016 became an investor in the Canadian education technology company Knowledgehook. Vicente Fox, who served as president of Mexico, is on the board of the company, and AOL co-founder Steve Case is also an investor, according to Knowledgehook.
