Steve Ells opened the first Chipotle in a former ice cream shop near the University of Denver in 1993. Now, three decades and a fast-casual dining revolution later, he’s the first-ever burrito billionaire.
Forbes estimates that Ells—who was Chipotle’s CEO until 2018 and its executive chairman until 2020—is worth $1 billion, making him one of 288 fresh faces on this year’s World’s Billionaires list, publishing Tuesday. He might be the unlikeliest of all.
Last year, 130,000 Chipotle employees dished out $11.3 billion worth of chicken, steak and barbacoa across 3,700 global stores—enough to make Chipotle the third most valuable restaurant chain on the planet, with a market capitalization of $68 billion, behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks.
Yet Ells, 59, a classically trained chef more likely to discuss the “provenance” of his ingredients than the profitability of his stores, made a few personal moves that seemed all but sure to keep him off the billionaires list.
Beginning in 1998, he sold huge pieces of Chipotle to McDonald’s in exchange for the fast-food chain’s help expanding Chipotle from 16 locations to nearly 500. By the time the business went public in 2006, it was the Golden Arches, not founder and CEO Ells, that reaped most of the rewards. McDonald’s owned 91% of Chipotle, which rocketed beyond a $1 billion valuation on its first day of trading; Ells owned less than 4%, a stake worth just $44 million at the time.
Then he quickly began offloading what little stock he had, and kept selling even as the price shot through the roof over the next decade. By 2014, Chipotle shares were up 1,400% from the IPO, yet Ells had whittled his stake down to 1%, prompting Forbes to declare that Ells was not a billionaire—and “may never be.”
But Chipotle just kept on rolling, pushing past 1,000 locations in 2010, then 2,000 by 2016. Meanwhile, Ells got a big boost from Chipotle’s compensation plan, which included an executive pay package granting him, and other execs, huge new batches of shares as the price of Chipotle stock rose. By the time Ells left the board in 2020, he had amassed an estimated $300 million (pretax) from all his sales and still owned around 1% of Chipotle’s stock, worth about $170 million. Chipotle shares rising another 250% in the years since, and likely investment returns as markets surged, have pushed Ells onto the World’s Billionaire list—more than three decades after he opened his first store, and despite his years of selling low then watching the stock price rise. Ells declined to comment on Forbes’ calculations
Not that Ells ever planned to get rich prepping burritos, bowls and salads for the masses. The son of a pharma executive, he was born in Indiana and grew up in Colorado, got an art history degree from the University of Colorado Boulder, then studied at the Culinary Institute of America before heading to San Francisco, where he served as sous chef at the landmark restaurant Stars. Inspired by the city’s taquerias, he headed back to Denver with hopes of opening a taqueria of his own—but only to use the profits to finance his real dream: creating a fine dining restaurant.
The first Chipotle opened its doors in 1993 with a strange name, a limited menu, a novel counter setup and high prices. In an era of 59-cent Taco Bell burritos, Ells charged more than $4. “Customers would walk in, and poke their head in, and then turn and walk away,” he said onstage at a Wall Street Journal event last June. “They didn’t get it.” But Ells’ fast-casual blend of quality food served at a fast-food pace caught on, and he soon ditched his fine dining aspirations, expanding to a second store in 1995 and a third in 1996.
Ells had 16 locations by 1998, but needed a cash infusion to keep growing. “We sent the business plan to 13 venture capital or investment banker-type companies that specialize in the restaurant business,” Ells’ father, Bob Ells, told Bloomberg in a 2015 oral history of Chipotle. “We got rejected by all 13.” McDonald’s, then on an acquisition spree, decided to invest. Soon the fast food giant owned a majority of Chipotle, though Ells continued to run it and continued to insist on using fresh ingredients prepared on site. When McDonald’s pivoted to focus on its core business just a few years later, it took Chipotle public in January 2006, and promptly sold off its entire 91% stake over the next nine months, when the business was worth around $2 billion. (That 91% would be worth $62 billion today.)
Sales climbed from $823 million in 2006 to $4.5 billion in 2017 as Ells expanded the chain across the United States and into Canada and Europe. But, reeling from a series of foodborne illness outbreaks, he was replaced as CEO in 2018 by Brian Niccol, who led a turnaround that drove Chipotle stock to new heights. Ells stayed on as executive chairman until 2020, when he stepped down and left the board.
A relatively private billionaire, he has purchased several Manhattan properties, including snagging a Greenwich Village townhouse for $30 million in 2021 and flipping it for a reported $5 million profit eight months later.
Now he’s trying to build the “restaurant of the future.” Last year, he opened Kernel, a fast-casual, all-vegan concept using robots to help prep food. That menu flopped, so now he’s switching to Counter Service, a sandwich concept with a storefront in Manhattan, hoping to find his next Chipotle. “You’ve created big things from scratch—” the Wall Street Journal reporter interviewing Ells said onstage in July. Ells was quick to interject: “I created big thing. We can see if we can go plural.”
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