Net Worth: $172 million

About J. Michael Pearson

J. Michael Pearson is an industrialist and businessman with an estimated net worth of $172 million. in 2015 he was listed on the forbes and was worth approximately $1.5 billion. His vast fortune comes from pharmaceutical giant Valeant which is one of Canada’s largest publicly traded companies on the nation. His net worth has recently dropped tremendously and he has dropped from listing on the forbes as a result of that he is on the billionaires dropout list for 2016. Valeant’s stock price in August of 2015 was as high as $340 per share making the CEO one of the richest in the world at a net worth of over a billion dollars. The company Pearson heads brought in more business by buying out smaller pharmaceutical companies and the company was incorporating these products into Valeant’s sales and supply chain and then raising the prices of these medicational products to levels sky high. As a result of the new business model for the corporation in July 2015, the company was valued at over $90 billion USD which converts to $116 billion CAD in 2015 by market capitalization, making it the largest public company in Canada and the largest pharmaceutical giant on the nation.