Sophia Al-Mansoor
Thomas Kaplan is one of the richest Businessman from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Thomas Kaplan's net worth US $1.0 billion (July 2018). (Last Update: December 11, 2023)
Smell by Rembrandt van Rijn (±1624), oil on panel
| Net Worth | US $1.0 billion (July 2018) |
| Salary | Under Review |
| Source of Income | Businessman |
| Cars | Not Available |
| House | Living in own house. |
In his youth, he developed a passion for wildlife conservation and for Rembrandt, which decades later inspired him, respectively, to found the field conservation group Panthera, and to establish The Leiden Collection, the world’s largest private grouping of works from the Dutch Golden Age. At Oxford University, Kaplan earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in history. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Malayan counterinsurgency and the manner in which commodities influence strategic planning. While earning his PhD, he worked as an analyst covering Israeli companies publicly traded in the US. On a business trip, he met his future wife, Dafna Recanati (the daughter of Israeli investor Leon Recanati), who had attended the same boarding school as Kaplan. Her mother, artist Mira Recanati, introduced him to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, who hired him as a junior partner in 1991. Kaplan had impressed Tiomkin by correctly predicting Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait several years before it took place. When Tiomkin decided to concentrate his investments solely in Israel in 1993, Kaplan moved on to pursue his own entrepreneurial ventures.
Inspired by Marc Faber, who held that precious metals were insurance against the “monetary foolishness” of central governments, Kaplan focused on natural resources investing. In 1993, he founded Apex Silver Mines to capitalize on the improving supply/demand fundamentals of metals. While he was chairman and chief executive officer of Apex, his team discovered and financed the San Cristobal deposit in Bolivia, now one of the largest producers of silver and zinc in the world. Kaplan retired from Apex Silver at the end of 2004 to focus on his new exploration projects.
Sophia analyzes international trade, startup ecosystems, retail transformation, and supply chain logistics for modern digital publications.
