Three Nigerian individuals have been recognized on Forbes’ prestigious list of the most powerful, impactful, and wealthiest Black Americans in 2024.
Wemimo Abbey, Tope Awotona, and Adebayo Ogunlesi, all based in the United States, have made significant contributions to their respective fields.
Wemimo Abbey, a 32-year-old Nigerian native, is the co-founder and co-CEO of Esusu, a New York-based fintech startup.
Esusu’s innovative platform enables renters to build their credit histories and scores by reporting rent payments to credit bureaus. With over 20,000 properties currently offering Esusu’s service, more than 1.8 million Americans have utilized the platform to record a rent payment. In early 2022, Esusu secured $130 million in funding, valuing the company at $1 billion.
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, he later moved to the United States, where his mother made a remarkable sacrifice to support his education. According to reports, Abbey’s mother sold her wedding ring to fund his travel and education in the US. Before co-founding Esusu, Abbey worked as a mergers and acquisitions consultant at PWC and co-founded a non-profit and a data analytics startup.
Tope Awotona, a 43-year-old Nigerian-born entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of Calendly, a scheduling software startup valued at $3 billion in 2021.
Awotona’s journey to success began when he moved to Atlanta from Lagos at the age of 15. He studied computer science at the University of Georgia before switching majors to business and management information.
After working as a salesman for several tech firms and launching a few failed startups, Awotona bootstrapped Calendly in 2013, driven by his frustration with the inefficiencies of scheduling meetings via email.
In 2021, Awotona raised $350 million to further scale Calendly, and today, his net worth is estimated to be around $1.4 billion.
Adebayo Ogunlesi, a 70-year-old Nigerian national, is the chairman and co-founder of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a New York-based private equity firm. In October, GIP was acquired by BlackRock for $12.5 billion in cash and shares, with Ogunlesi remaining chairman and CEO of GIP.
According to Forbes, Ogunlesi’s net worth is estimated to be around $1.7 billion.
Ogunlesi’s impressive educational background includes a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford, a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the early 1980s, Ogunlesi worked as an attorney at the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Prior to co-founding GIP in 2006, Ogunlesi spent over 20 years as an investment banker at Credit Suisse.
Other notable individuals featured on the list of wealthiest Black Americans include Dr. Dre, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Gary Linnen, among others.
