Ahmed Zayat is one of the most popular and richest Entrepreneur who was born on August 31, 1962 in Cairo, Cairo, United States. Ahmed Zayat was born in Egypt in 1962 to an affluent family and grew up an ethnically diverse neighborhood in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His father, Alaa al-Zayat, was a prominent doctor and professor of medicine, a personal physician to Anwar Sadat. His grandfather, Ahmed Hasan al-Zayyat, was a leading intellectual who established the Egyptian literary magazine al-Risala, described as “the most important intellectual weekly in 1930s Egypt and the Arab world.” Born into what was then a peasant family, the earlier al-Zayyat studied at Al-Azhar University before taking up legal studies in Cairo and Paris; he taught Arabic literature at American University in Cairo, and for three years in Baghdad, before founding al-Risala in 1933.
Zayat first began buying Thoroughbred race horses in 2005. Zayat Stables owns approximately 200 horses at any one time. Zayat made a number of big-ticket sales purchases early on including a horse he named Maimonides, purchased at Keeneland as a yearling in 2006 for $4.6 million. In addition, Zayat paid $1.6 million for the highest-priced horse at the 2006 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga select yearling sale, a filly by Empire Maker named Mushka, whom he resold in 2008 for $2.4 million.
Zayat continued to run Al-Ahram until 2007, but periodically returned to the United States, where he started buying racehorses and formed Zayat Stables in 2005. His motivation to return to the US was, in part, to commute less and be more involved with his family and children. Upon leaving Al-Ahram, he declared that he was “retiring”, but as his wife explained, “he can’t be retired for more than 15 seconds,” and he soon expanded his horse operation to include both breeding and racing stock. He still owns other business interests in Egypt, including being the majority shareholder of Misr Glass Manufacturing, which is Egypt’s largest maker of glass containers.
Zayat’s bankruptcy revealed other problems. His bankruptcy documents listed four loans he had made to members of the Jelinsky family. Two members of that family, Michael and Jeffrey Jelinsky, had pleaded guilty in 2009 to illegal bookmaking. As a result, the racing commissions in California and Kentucky opened investigations on Zayat; racing licensees are not to associate with bookmakers or convicted felons. Zayat claimed that he had no knowledge of the Jelinskys’ illegal acts. He stated that he thought the brothers were professional gamblers and that they had financial need. Further, he said he loaned them money because he knew their father and that the money they owed him was unrelated to gambling; he stated that some of the money he loaned was to assist one of the brothers with a divorce. He was cleared in both states. Although New York also stated that they were investigating, there were no news reports of any adverse action. Zayat stated that he had been visited by federal agents who played tapes where the Jelinsky brothers discussed how they had cheated Zayat out of money by giving him bad betting advice.
Zayat was born in Cairo, Egypt to a wealthy family, and grew up in an ethnically-diverse neighborhood where he learned to ride horses. At age 18, he moved to the United States where he attended college and ultimately obtained a master’s degree in business and public health from Boston University. After a brief career in commercial real estate in New York City, he returned to Egypt, and for about a decade ran the Al-Ahram Beverages Company, which he owned as part of an investment group. After the company was purchased by Heineken in 2002, Zayat stayed on a few more years but also began investing in racehorses and established Zayat Stables in 2005. Upon returning to the United States for good in 2007, he made his racing stables his full-time occupation, working with his son, Justin, to build the business.
