Cook is owner and chief executive officer of Cook Group, a manufacturer of medical devices. The Bloomington, Indiana-based company makes catheters, dilators, stents and wire guides through its medical supplies division. Cook Medical sells products and offers training in 135 countries, and had revenue of about $2.4 billion in 2018.
Carl Cook's net worth of $15.6B can buy ...
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The majority of Cook's wealth is derived from his ownership of Cook Group, the medical device company founded by his late father. The company had about $2.36 billion in revenue in 2018, according to Christa Curtis, a company spokeswoman. It sells products in 135 countries, according to its website. This analysis assumes the billionaire inherited all of the company.
Cook Group is valued based on the average enterprise value-to-sales multiples of three comparable publicly traded peer companies: Boston Scientific, Edwards Lifesciences and Medtronic.
The valuation was updated on June 18, 2019 to reflect 2018 revenue and this led to an increase in the calculation of about $900 million.
Carl Cook was born in Bloomington, Indiana to William Alfred Cook and Gayle Karch Cook in 1962. The couple started a medical device company in the spare bedroom of their apartment using a blowtorch, a soldering iron and plastic tubing to make catheters, according to a New York Times article in 2011. Their first sale was two catheters, for $7.50 apiece, the newspaper reported. The following year, Bill Cook met Charles Dotter, who developed angioplasty, a method used to widen obstructed blood vessels. That was the start of a partnership that revolutionized minimally invasive medicine.
The business expanded to Europe and Asia in the 1970s, allowing doctors to perform 2,000 cardiovascular catheterizations a day by the end of that decade, according to its website. They expanded to serve more niche areas such as gastrointestinal endoscopy and urology, with the establishment of MED Institute, its research and development facility.
Cook Group was the first company to sell coronary stents in the U.S., which are tubes inserted into blood vessels and, in the 1990s, became the world's largest closely held medical device manufacturer, according to its website. It's gone from selling wire guides, needles and catheters to making 16,000 products that are distributed in 135 countries.
Gayle Cook was kidnapped in 1989 by Arthur Curry, an Indianapolis man and failed Chicago investment broker, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal. Curry bound her hands, legs, mouth and eyes with duct tape and asked her husband for a ransom of $1.2 million in cash and $500,000 in gold. FBI agents caught Curry 26 hours later, the newspaper reported.
Bill Cook died in 2011. He is survived by Gayle and Carl, who was appointed chief executive officer of Cook when his father passed away.