Jules Kroll has an estimated net worth of $2 billion. Most of that fortune comes from a single transaction: the 2004 sale of his company, Kroll, Inc., to Marsh & McLennan Companies for roughly $1.9 billion. That deal capped off more than three decades of work building what became the world’s best-known corporate investigations and risk consulting firm.
Kroll didn’t stop working after the sale. He went on to found several more companies in the years that followed, including a bond rating agency and an intelligence firm now run by his son.
Who is Jules Kroll?
Jules B. Kroll was born on May 18, 1941, in Bayside, Queens, New York City, and grew up in a Jewish household. His father ran a printing company that struggled for years under pressure from purchasing agents who demanded bribes and kickbacks before agreeing to do business. That early exposure to corruption would end up shaping Kroll’s entire career.
He attended Cornell University, where he was inducted into the Quill and Dagger honor society, and later studied at Georgetown University Law Center.
How Did Jules Kroll Get His Start in Business?
Jules Kroll’s business career began by accident, not design. After his father fell ill, Kroll, then an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, took over the family printing business and found it still at the mercy of corrupt purchasing agents. He turned that problem into a service, using his inside knowledge to help other companies identify and eliminate the bribery draining their budgets.
His first client in this new line of work was the parent company of Marvel Comics. Kroll initially took a cut of the savings he generated by rooting out corruption, but he was making so much money that Marvel eventually switched him to a flat retainer instead. Kroll has often joked that characters like Spider-Man and the Hulk are, in a roundabout way, the reason he became wealthy.
What is Kroll, Inc. and Why Did It Become So Valuable?
Kroll, Inc. is the corporate investigations and risk consulting firm Jules Kroll founded in 1972, originally as J. Kroll Associates. It grew into a global operation with more than 3,000 employees across 35-plus countries, and it’s widely credited with inventing the modern corporate investigations industry, the reason the company eventually sold for close to $1.9 billion.
Kroll built the firm around a distinctive hiring strategy: former prosecutors, law enforcement officials, journalists, and academics, all brought in to develop techniques for gathering accurate risk intelligence.
After the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act passed in 1977, Kroll expanded internationally, opening offices in Paris, Moscow, São Paulo, Tokyo, Singapore, and Manila to handle growing demand for compliance and auditing work.
The firm’s highest-profile cases cemented its reputation. Kroll helped Nokia and Motorola recover $2.7 billion tied to a dispute involving Cem Uzan in Turkey, tracked wealth hidden by dictators including Ferdinand Marcos and Jean-Claude Duvalier, and in 1991 was brought in by the government of Kuwait to trace Saddam Hussein’s corporate holdings.
What Did Jules Kroll Do After Selling Kroll, Inc.?
After selling Kroll, Inc. to Marsh & McLennan in 2004, Jules Kroll founded two more companies: Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) and K2 Intelligence. KBRA holds the distinction of being the first new bond rating agency launched since the 2008 financial crisis, while K2 Intelligence continued Kroll’s original focus on corporate investigations and risk.
In total, Celebrity Net Worth credits Jules Kroll as the founder of 5 separate companies over the course of his career. K2 Intelligence is now run by his son Jeremy Kroll, while another son, comedian Nick Kroll, has built his own career and net worth in entertainment.
Jules Kroll has 4 children in total.
Has Jules Kroll Faced Any Business Controversies?
Yes. In 2020, Kroll Bond Rating Agency agreed to pay a $2 million settlement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after the SEC found failures in the firm’s internal controls around ratings for mortgage-backed securities and collateralized loan obligation combination notes.
The SEC’s case centered on KBRA making adjustments to its final credit ratings without a documented analytical method explaining why those changes were made, along with inadequate internal safeguards to catch the issue, a violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
KBRA denied wrongdoing and maintained that its rating methods were sound. The episode is a reminder of how much scrutiny credit rating agencies face, given the role flawed ratings played in triggering the 2008 financial crisis.
Where Does Jules Kroll’s Net Worth Stand Today?
Jules Kroll’s net worth is estimated at $2 billion, a figure that has remained largely unchanged in public reporting since shortly after the Marsh & McLennan sale in 2004.
That number demonstrates the scale of the deal that made him wealthy, rather than a fresh, itemized accounting of his current assets, net worth figures for private individuals like Kroll are estimates built from public information, not audited financial statements.
What is well documented is the arc of his career: from taking over a struggling family printing business, to building the company that effectively created the corporate investigations industry, to a multibillion-dollar sale, and then founding new firms in bond ratings and intelligence that kept him active in the field for decades afterward.
Conclusion
Jules Kroll’s fortune is a case study in building one category-defining company and cashing out at the right moment. The $1.9 billion sale of Kroll, Inc. in 2004 remains the foundation of his estimated $2 billion net worth, but his continued work founding Kroll Bond Rating Agency and K2 Intelligence shows a career that didn’t end with that single transaction.
Now in his mid-80s, Kroll is remembered less for a specific balance sheet number and more for inventing an entire industry that didn’t exist before he built it.
