Shahid Khan
Shahid Khan
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Shahid Khan

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Shahid Khan

Shahid Rafiq Khan (born July 18, 1950) is a Pakistani and American businessman. He owns the Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League (NFL) and Fulham F.C. of the Premier League and is also a lead investor of the American wrestling promotion All Elite Wrestling (AEW), owned by his son, Tony. Khan is also the owner of Flex-N-Gate, an American supplier of motor vehicle components.

Khan appeared on the front cover of Forbes magazine in 2012, associating him as the face of the American Dream. As of January 2025, Khan's estimated net worth is $13.3 billion. In 2024, he ranked 55th in the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, 167th richest in the world, and the richest auto parts magnate.

Shahid Rafiq Khan was born on July 18, 1950 in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan, to a middle-class Punjabi Muslim family involved in the construction industry. His father, Rafiq Khan, owned a shop that sold survey and drawing equipment, while his mother Zakia Khan was a professor of mathematics. Shahid Khan also has a younger brother named Faran Khan, a local businessman in Pakistan.

Khan moved to the United States in 1967 at age 16 to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. When he went to the United States, Khan spent his first night in a $2/night room at the university YMCA, and his first job was washing dishes for $1.20 an hour. Khan joined the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at the school and graduated from the Grainger College of Engineering with a BSc in industrial engineering in 1971. He was later awarded the Mechanical Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in 1999.

Khan worked at the automotive manufacturing company Flex-N-Gate Corporation while attending the University of Illinois. When he graduated, Khan was hired as the engineering director for the company. In 1978, he started Bumper Works, which made car bumpers for customized pickup trucks and body shop repairs. The funds to start the new business included a $50,000 loan from the Small Business Administration and $16,000 of his own savings.

In 1980, Khan bought Flex-N-Gate from his former employer Charles Gleason Butzow, bringing Bumper Works into the fold. The company grew under him, so that it supplied bumpers for the Big Three automakers. In 1984, Khan began supplying a small number of bumpers for Toyota pickups. By 1987, it was the sole supplier for Toyota pickups, and by 1989, it was the sole supplier for the entire Toyota line in the United States. Adopting the Toyota Way increased company efficiency and ability to change its manufacturing process within a few minutes. Since then, the company has grown from $17 million in sales to an estimated $2 billion in 2010 to $8.89 billion in 2020. Its operation in Sandusky, Ohio, is one of the largest automotive light manufacturing plants in the United States.

By 2019, Flex-N-Gate had 25,000 employees and 69 manufacturing plants in the United States, China, Argentina, Spain, France, Germany, Mexico and Canada. In 2020, it had a revenue of $8.9 billion and was ranked as the 46th largest privately held American company by Forbes. It is also ranked by Automotive News as the seventh largest American automotive parts supplier and overall 33rd largest supplier in the world.[citation needed]

Khan's first attempt to purchase a National Football League team came on February 11, 2010, when he entered into an agreement to acquire 60% of the then-St. Louis Rams from Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez, subject to approval by other NFL owners. However, Stan Kroenke, the minority shareholder of the Rams, ultimately exercised a clause in his ownership agreement to match any proposed bid.

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