David L. Steward

Male

Black

Coarse public-record coding; race is a noisy, interpretive category.

African American

Descendant. No documented immigration in the family line.

Christian. He has said church and music were "the centerpieces of where we found peace and joy" during hard years.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture; the live Forbes article page blocks automated retrieval. Denomination not established.

not established

Not established whether he had a home or in-laws to fall back on if World Wide Technology had failed in the early 1990s.

His wife Thelma worked as a nurse through this period, the only documented income floor; his own income from the company went unpaid for stretches during the rocky early years.

2

Two children, Kimberly and David Steward II; their ages at the 1990 founding are not established.

The company fell behind on payments for a $1 million line of credit, and a collection agency repossessed Steward's personal car in 1993 over unpaid consumer debt.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

No paycheck for stretches, unpaid heating and trash bills at the office, and a car repossessed from the company parking lot with his briefcase still in the trunk, during World Wide Technology's first several years.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

The hardship was imposed, not chosen. There was nothing to fall back on.

A repossessed car and unpaid utility bills are imposed distress, not chosen austerity. Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Father, Harold Lloyd Steward, worked as a mechanic, trash collector, and janitor, and ran a small farm. Mother, Dorothy Elizabeth Massingale, was a homemaker.

A parent worked for themselves, the strongest known predictor of founding.

A small subsistence farm alongside his father's wage jobs, not a registered business. Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

not established

Not established in the sources reviewed.

7

Youngest of eight children. Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

8

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

A small farm outside Clinton, Missouri, a rural, segregated town; without indoor plumbing for much of his childhood.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Born in Chicago in 1951; family relocated to Clinton, Missouri around 1953, while he was a toddler.

He and his seven older siblings were among the first Black children to integrate Clinton's schools, public swimming pool, movie theater, and restaurants; he later helped integrate the town's public pool in 1967.

Recalled, "I vividly remember segregation — separate schools, sitting in the balcony at the movie theater, being barred from the public swimming pool."

A former boss of Jim Kavanaugh's, at an electronics distributor where Kavanaugh then worked, knew Steward and talked him into cofounding a new distributor with Kavanaugh in 1989-90. That third cofounder left the company in 1993.

Name of the third cofounder not established in sources reviewed. Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Enrolled at Central Missouri State University in 1969 with no athletic scholarship, and showed up to watch basketball practice every day until the coach put him on the team the following year and gave him a scholarship.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Jim Kavanaugh, a former semi-pro soccer player turned electronics salesman, supplied the product and technical knowledge; Steward supplied the startup capital and the sales relationships. Kavanaugh put in no cash and received no equity at founding, earning his first 15% stake in 1995.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

36

Dated to 1987, when auditing Union Pacific's freight bills required him to build what he believed was St. Louis's largest computer network at the time. Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

15

From his first sales job at Missouri Pacific Railroad (1975) to founding World Wide Technology (1990).

5

Wagner Electric, Missouri Pacific Railroad, Union Pacific, FedEx, and his own consulting firms, before founding World Wide Technology.

BS in Business, Central Missouri State University, 1973

Direct four-year degree, on a basketball scholarship earned after walking on as a freshman.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

not established

A regional state university; no documented network effect beyond the degree itself.

Roughly $250,000, contributed by Steward alone to found World Wide Technology in 1990.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

A separate, earlier $2,000 loan from his father funded Transportation Business Specialists in the early 1980s, the freight-audit firm whose income eventually fed the larger sum he put into World Wide Technology.

It needed capital up front, before it earned anything.

The company ran on a credit line and fell behind on payments before it found reliable revenue through government contracts; it was not profitable from day one.

The ~$250,000 WWT startup contribution came from Steward's own earnings and the two consulting firms he had built and run since the early 1980s, not from a wage employer.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

No outside equity investors at any point. Grown on operating cash flow plus a $1 million line of credit early on. As of a 2019 accounting, Steward held 59% of the company (about $3.4B) and Kavanaugh held 36% (about $2.1B).

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Early orders from the Departments of Defense, Transportation, and Agriculture came through federal rules setting aside contracts for minority-owned small businesses. The company outgrew that size threshold in 2001.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Grew out of his own prior work: building a computer network to audit Union Pacific's freight bills convinced him technology, not shipping audits, was the bigger opportunity.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

0

His two earlier consulting firms (Transportation Business Specialists, Transport Administrative Services) were not failures; World Wide Technology itself came close to failing but did not fold.

Steward personally: his own capital, his unpaid stretches of income, and his repossessed car. Kavanaugh absorbed cost by working years for no equity.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

39

World Wide Technology founded July 1990; born July 2, 1951.

Founded as corporate and government IT purchasing was shifting from mainframes toward networked PCs, servers, and telecom equipment, and while federal minority-owned small-business contracting rules were actively steering government purchases toward firms like his.

Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Built from nothing, alongside two prior small consulting firms he had bought and run himself.

39

36

1990 founding to 2026, ongoing. Steward stepped back from day-to-day operations roughly a decade before 2019 but remains chairman and majority owner.

IT systems integration and reselling

12400000000

Forbes real-time tracker figure as of August 2026, for a majority stake in a privately held company. Reported figures have moved substantially year to year (roughly $3.7B in 2021, $6B in 2023, $10B in 2025) as the underlying valuation methodology and company performance changed. Band only, never treat as a precise figure.

Journalistic estimate

Private-company estimate, not a public equity mark or a filing.

2026

Nearly all wealth is a majority equity stake in a privately held operating company generating roughly $20 billion in annual revenue, not salary.

Widely described as among the one or two wealthiest African Americans, a title that has shifted between him and Robert F. Smith depending on the year and the estimate used. Recipient of the Horatio Alger Award (2014), Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (1998), and Black Engineer of the Year (2012). Serves or has served on the boards of Washington University in St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Uncapped

Low key, Faith driven, Self reliant, Generous

Press

Before

Reputation as a successful, faith-driven operator was established well before recent billionaire-list attention. Forbes article retrieved via Wayback Machine capture.

Asset

The reputation accrued from behaviour rather than being manufactured.

Multiple sources describe him as deliberately low-profile; he co-wrote one book, "Doing Business by the Good Book" (2004), setting out his faith-based management philosophy, which is some cultivation but not a sustained media-building effort.