Keinath is a shareholder of Cargill, the largest closely held company in the U.S. The Wayzata, Minnesota-based commodity business had sales of about $113.5 billion in the year to May 31, 2019 from the production and trading of agricultural commodities. The billionaire owns 11% of the business.
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Keinath is a fourth-generation shareholder in Cargill, the Wayzata, Minnesota-based commodities conglomerate in which she owns an 11% stake.
Her stake is derived from ownership details disclosed in debt prospectuses, a lawsuit over the taxation of the Cargill family trust in 1972, a corporate history of Cargill by Wayne G. Broehl, and the fact that Margaret Cargill owned 17.5% of the company when she died in 2006, according to Bloomberg Markets. Information from these sources indicate the families evenly split shares among bloodline heirs and that disposition of shares by family members has been small. There are 23 family shareholders.
Members of the extended family own 87.2% of Cargill, with executives and an employee stock ownership plan owning the rest, according to debt prospectuses detailing share classes and shares counts held by these groups. To fulfill Margaret Cargill's bequest of her stake in Cargill to charity, the company spun off Mosaic to liquidate her stock in 2011. This action increased each family member's percentage stake in Cargill, based on reduced shares reported by the company after the spinoff. Under this formula, Keinath is credited with 88 million of Cargill's 808 million shares.
Cargill had sales of $113.5 billion in the year to May 31, 2019, according to the company's website, and debt of about $12 billion as of October 2019, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg. It's valued using the average enterprise value-to-sales multiple of two publicly trade peer companies: Archer-Daniels-Midland and Bunge.
Keinath is also credited with a portion of Cargill dividends and Mosaic shares sold since 1994.
Lisa Clemens, a Cargill spokeswoman, declined to comment on the billionaire's net worth calculation.
Pauline MacMillan Keinath was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1934, the youngest of four siblings to Cargill MacMillan Sr. and his wife. She's the great-granddaughter of William W. Cargill, the founder of Cargill, who started the commodities business with one grain storage warehouse in Conover, Iowa, in 1865.
The billionaire inherited the Cargill stake after her father died in 1968. Her brother, Whitney, was CEO and chairman of the family-owned business from 1976 to 1995. She's married and lives in St. Louis. The couple has four children.