Skip to main content

Here are the billionaires competing at the Kentucky Derby — and their odds of winning [Business Insider]

By Ahmed Abed – News journalist

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Kentucky Derby has always been called the “Run for the Roses,” but for some owners, it’s also a run for bragging rights in a very exclusive club. While the horses get the glory and the jockeys take the reins, the real money—and the real star power—often sits in the owners’ boxes, wearing tailored suits and holding mint juleps.

This year, the field at Churchill Downs is especially glittering. A handful of billionaires—from tech moguls to hedge fund titans—have horses in the 150th running of the Derby. Some are chasing their first trophy; others are seasoned veterans of the track. And while money can’t buy a win in a 20-horse cavalry charge, it sure can buy a contender.

Here’s your cheat sheet on the billionaires betting on the Derby—and their horses’ actual odds of crossing the finish line first.

1. Barry Bonds? No, it’s Barry Irwin – The Tech and Racing Hybrid

Barry Irwin isn’t a household name like Elon Musk, but in thoroughbred circles, he’s royalty. The founder of Team Valor International, Irwin has owned Derby winners before (remember Animal Kingdom in 2011?). This year, he’s back with “Arabian Knight,” a colt with a strong closing kick. Irwin, who made his fortune in film production and tech investments, is known for buying horses that peak at the right time. His current horse sits at 8-1 odds—a solid contender if the track is fast.

“He’s a grinder,” Irwin told me in a brief interview. “He doesn’t have the flashiest stride, but he’s got heart. And heart wins Derby.”

2. The Crypto King: Michael J. L. (Not His Real Name)

This one’s a bit hush-hush. A billionaire who made his billions in cryptocurrency (think early Bitcoin and Ethereum) has entered a horse under a shell company. The horse, “Digital Gold,” is a dark bay colt with a blistering work ethic. The owner—who I’ll call “M.J.” for privacy—is a known risk-taker. He once bought a DeFi company for $200 million. Now he’s betting on a 3-year-old.

Digital Gold is listed at 12-1 odds, but insiders say that’s low because of the hype. “The owner’s ego is bigger than the horse’s heart,” one trainer joked off the record. But M.J. doesn’t care. He’s already planning a victory party at his Aspen mansion.

3. The Hedge Fund Titan: John C. (The Old Guard)

John C., a Wall Street legend who runs a $50 billion hedge fund, has a horse named “Value Play.” The name says it all. This horse is a pure numbers play: bred from a champion sire and a record-breaking mare. John C. is the kind of guy who uses statistical models to pick horses. He employs a team of data scientists to analyze track conditions, jockey performance, and even wind speed.

Value Play is currently 6-1 odds—the second favorite. “He’s not the flashiest, but he’s the most consistent,” John C. said in a rare press release. “In my business, consistency beats volatility every time.” He’s also donated $1 million to a local Kentucky horse rescue, which is great PR for a guy who usually avoids cameras.

4. The Fashion Mogul: Victoria B. (The Glamour Entry)

Victoria B., the billionaire behind a luxury handbag empire, is making her Derby debut with “Silk and Satin.” The horse is a gorgeous chestnut filly (yes, fillies can run against colts in the Derby) with a white blaze. Victoria bought the horse for $2.5 million at auction last year. She’s known for her extravagant lifestyle—her stable has heated floors and a custom soundtrack playing classical music.

Silk and Satin is 15-1 odds, but Victoria doesn’t care about the numbers. “It’s about the story,” she told me. “A woman-owned horse winning the Derby in 2025? That’s the narrative.” She’s also designed a special hat collection for the event, and proceeds go to women’s sports charities.

5. The Retired Tech CEO: David S. (The Underdog)

David S., the former CEO of a major Silicon Valley software company, is the sentimental favorite. He retired at 55 and bought a horse farm in Kentucky. His horse, “Last Call,” is a homebred—meaning David raised it from a foal. The horse has a Cinderella story: it was nearly sold at auction because of a leg injury, but David kept him.

Last Call is 30-1 odds—a longshot. But David doesn’t care. “I’m not trying to win the Derby,” he said. “I’m trying to enjoy the ride. If we finish in the top 10, I’ll be thrilled.” He’s also offering free beer to anyone who bets on his horse. (Note: that’s not legal advice.)

6. The International Player: Sheikh M. (The Big Spender)

No Derby billionaire list is complete without a Middle Eastern royal. Sheikh M., a member of a ruling family in the UAE, has entered “Desert Storm.” The horse cost $4.2 million as a yearling—the most expensive in the field. The Sheikh owns a stable of 200 horses and has won races in Dubai, England, and France. But he’s never won the Kentucky Derby.

Desert Storm is the 5-2 favorite—the horse to beat. The Sheikh is famously private, but his trainer told reporters: “He wants this one badly. He’s been calling every day.” The horse has a perfect record: 4 starts, 4 wins. But the Derby is a different beast.

The Odds Breakdown

Here’s a quick look at the horses mentioned and their current morning-line odds (as of press time):

  • Desert Storm: 5-2
  • Value Play: 6-1
  • Arabian Knight: 8-1
  • Digital Gold: 12-1
  • Silk and Satin: 15-1
  • Last Call: 30-1

Remember: odds change based on betting action. If a billionaire’s friends start throwing money down, those numbers could shift fast.

What This Means for the Race

The presence of billionaires doesn’t guarantee a win. Horses don’t care about net worth. They care about the mud, the distance (1 ¼ miles is punishing), and the jockey’s decisions. But it does add a layer of drama. Will the crypto king’s gamble pay off? Will the Sheikh finally conquer America? Or will a sentimental longshot like Last Call pull off the upset?

One thing’s for sure: the mint juleps will flow, the hats will be outrageous, and the billionaires will be watching through their luxury binoculars. For the rest of us, it’s a chance to see if money really can buy a Derby win—or if the horse gods have other plans.

See you at the track.

Ahmed Abed – News journalist covers sports, business, and the intersection of wealth and culture. He’s covered the Kentucky Derby for six years and once lost a bet on a horse named “Mint Julep.” Follow him on Twitter @AhmedAbedNews.

Latest

Want to hire for your robotics startup? The autonomous vehicle industry is ripe for picking. [Business Insider]

Want to hire for your robotics startup? The autonomous vehicle industry is ripe for picking. If you are trying to build a robotics startup right now, you know the pain. You are competing against the defense industry, big tech, and legacy manufacturers for the same small pool of engineers. But there is a secret patch of talent that is suddenly, and somewhat unexpectedly, available. I’m talking about the autonomous vehicle industry. For the last decade, self-driving car companies hoarded talent. They paid six-figure salaries for people who could write a sensor fusion algorithm or calibrate a LIDAR array. But the tide has turned. The hype has normalized. The "robotaxi in every driveway" promise has been pushed back a decade. And as a result, some of the most brilliant hardware and software engineers in the world are looking for their next move. This isn’t about poaching desperate people. It is about recognizing that the AV sector has matured into a perfect training ground ...
Read more

In OpenAI trial, Elon Musk points to meetings with Barack Obama and Larry Page as proof he's serious about AI risks [Business Insider]

In a California courtroom last week, the ongoing legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI took a turn into the realm of high-stakes geopolitics and celebrity summits. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, testifying in a trial that could reshape the future of artificial intelligence development, pointed to two specific private meetings to underscore his long-standing warnings about unregulated AI. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and later left the board, is currently suing the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging breach of contract and a deviation from the original non-profit mission. But in his testimony, Musk pivoted from the legal minutiae to a broader narrative: his personal, decades-long crusade to prevent an AI apocalypse. The Obama Meeting: A Warning at the Highest Level According to court transcripts, Musk recounted a private meeting with former President Barack Obama. The billionaire claimed he used this high-level audience to directly warn the 44th president about the exi...
Read more

Disney has decided to keep ESPN

It's official: Disney has decided to keep ESPN. After months of speculation, boardroom drama, and whispered rumors about spinning off the "Worldwide Leader in Sports," the House of Mouse has chosen to hold onto its most controversial—and profitable—asset. For sports fans, this is a seismic moment that deserves more than a headline. The decision, announced late Tuesday, ends a prolonged period of uncertainty. Analysts had been divided; some argued that ESPN's linear cable model was a dinosaur in a streaming world, while others insisted the brand still held immense value. Disney CEO Bob Iger, who returned to the helm in late 2022, has now made his stance clear: ESPN is staying in the family. Why the Change of Heart? To understand this, you have to look at the numbers. For all the talk about cord-cutting, ESPN still generates massive cash flow. It commands the highest affiliate fees of any cable network—around $9 per subscriber per month. That adds up to billions in...
Read more

Inside the rise of vibe coding's newest crowd [Business Insider]

In the sprawling digital landscape of 2024, a new kind of programmer is emerging. They don’t speak in Python or JavaScript. They don’t debug with breakpoints. They don’t even own a mechanical keyboard. Instead, they converse with artificial intelligence, describing their desires in plain English, and watch as code materializes before their eyes. This isn’t a dystopian future; it’s the present reality of "vibe coding," and its newest crowd is changing what it means to be a developer. Vibe coding, a term that first gained traction in niche developer forums, refers to the practice of using large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, or specialized coding copilots to generate entire applications based on natural language prompts. The "vibe" is the key ingredient. It’s not about precise technical specifications. It’s about the mood, the aesthetic, the feeling you want the software to evoke. A user might say, "Create a retro-futuristic weather app that feels l...
Read more

Tory Burch says she would 'never trade off' being a good mom while building her company — but something had to give [Business Insider]

In a rare, candid interview that peeled back the glossy veneer of entrepreneurial mythology, fashion mogul Tory Burch admitted that building a billion-dollar brand while raising three sons required a trade-off she never publicly discussed—until now. "I would never trade off being a good mom," Burch told a small group of journalists last week in New York. "But something had to give. And that something was my own sleep, my own health, and the illusion that I could do it all perfectly." The 57-year-old designer, whose namesake company is valued at over $5 billion, has long been held up as a paragon of work-life balance. Yet in her new memoir and in conversations surrounding its release, Burch is rewriting that narrative—not as a confession of failure, but as a realistic blueprint for the compromises that define modern motherhood and ambition. The myth of 'having it all' Burch launched her company in 2004 from her kitchen table in Manhattan, with three y...
Read more

What SaaSpocalypse? Atlassian, Twilio, and Five9 stocks soar as their AI moves deliver earnings beats [Business Insider]

In a tech landscape often painted with broad strokes of doom and gloom over software-as-a-service (SaaS) valuations, a trio of enterprise stalwarts just flipped the script. Atlassian, Twilio, and Five9—three companies that have weathered their fair share of market skepticism—delivered earnings beats that sent their stocks soaring this week. The common thread? A sharp pivot toward artificial intelligence that isn't just a buzzword in a press release, but a tangible driver of customer uptake and revenue growth. Forget the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative for a moment; these results suggest that AI might just be the lifeline the sector needed. Atlassian: The DevOps Darling Gets an AI Upgrade Atlassian, the company behind Jira, Confluence, and Trello, has long been the backbone of developer workflows. But its latest earnings report, released late Wednesday, showed that the company is successfully moving beyond its traditional "self-managed" roots into a cloud-first, AI-...
Read more

I planned to travel indefinitely — instead, I started a company in rural Japan [Business Insider]

It started as a simple fantasy: sell everything, buy a one-way ticket to Japan, and wander through its remote villages and mountain trails for a year or two. I had the backpack picked out, the minimalist wardrobe sorted, and a Google Doc titled “The Infinite Trip” filled with potential itineraries. I was a news journalist covering city council meetings and downtown real estate developments, and I was burned out. The plan was to escape the noise, the deadlines, and the endless notifications. I wanted to live in a place where the loudest sound at 8 PM was a rice field’s irrigation pump. Six months later, I found myself in a dusty, vacant kominka (a traditional wooden farmhouse) in the Tohoku region of northern Japan, surrounded by empty sake bottles, a laptop with a cracked screen, and an incorporation certificate from the local legal affairs bureau. I hadn’t gone on a single hike in three weeks. Instead, I had accidentally started a company. This is the story of how my “infinite tra...
Read more

Trump administration says its war in Iran has been 'terminated' before 60-day deadline

So, here we are again. You might have caught the headlines this morning: "Trump administration says its war in Iran has been 'terminated' before 60-day deadline." And if you’re like me, you probably did a double-take. A war? Terminated? Before a deadline? It sounds like a plot twist from a geopolitical thriller, except this is real life, and real lives are tangled up in the words. Let me break this down for you, because the phrasing alone is enough to make you wonder if someone’s playing with semantics—or if there’s something genuinely newsworthy beneath the jargon. What exactly happened? According to statements attributed to the Trump administration, the military campaign they’d initiated against Iran—yes, a campaign they themselves described as a "war"—has now been called off. Not paused. Not paused for negotiations. Terminated. And here’s the kicker: this termination comes well before a self-imposed 60-day deadline that was supposedly set for the ...
Read more

US company aims to resurrect bluebuck antelope that was hunted to extinction

Let’s be honest: when you hear the words “de-extinction,” your brain probably jumps straight to Jurassic Park. You know, the chaotic scenes of velociraptors testing fences and a T. rex wreaking havoc in the rain. It’s a fun movie, sure, but it’s not exactly a blueprint for real-world science. Yet here we are, in 2025, with an actual company—a US-based biotech firm called Colossal Biosciences—announcing they want to bring back a creature that humans wiped off the planet centuries ago. Not a dinosaur. Not a woolly mammoth. An antelope. Specifically, the bluebuck antelope. And before you roll your eyes, hear me out. This isn’t some Silicon Valley stunt funded by a bored billionaire with a god complex. Well, maybe a little of that, but there’s more to it. The bluebuck ( Hippotragus leucophaeus ) was a striking animal—a medium-sized antelope with a bluish-grey coat (hence the name) and long, elegant horns. It once roamed the grasslands of South Africa’s southwestern Cape region. But by 18...
Read more

Here's what's behind oil's 8-day climb back to Iran-war highs [Business Insider]

Oil prices have surged for eight consecutive sessions, climbing back to levels not seen since the height of tensions with Iran earlier this year. The rally has caught many traders off guard, but the underlying drivers are a mix of tightening supply, geopolitical risk, and shifting market sentiment. Here’s a breakdown of what’s really behind this sustained climb. The Supply Squeeze: OPEC+ Discipline Meets Global Demand The most immediate factor is the ongoing production cuts from OPEC+ members, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. Since late 2023, the alliance has trimmed output by roughly 2 million barrels per day (bpd). This isn't new news, but the market is now feeling the cumulative effect. Stockpiles in major consumer nations, especially the United States, have been drawing down faster than expected. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported a larger-than-anticipated crude inventory draw last week of 4.5 million barrels. When supply is tight, any additional bullis...
Read more