Our affluent county is well-known as the home of super-rich celebrities and businesspeople – but one of the richest people in the UK also chose to make Buckinghamshire his home.
Peter Kelly, who set up the hugely successful Marlow company Softcat, lives in Penn - but is also a billionaire.
He was named once again in May’s The Sunday Times Rich List – in the top 250 most wealthy people or families living in the UK.
Although he dropped five places in 2022 compared to 2021 – from 163rd most wealthy to 168th – his fortune increased by £30 million in that time, to £1.065 billion.
That puts him just behind Lord Rothschild and family, who have a wealth of £1.083 billion, and Lord Sugar, who boasts £1.088 billion.
He comes ahead of people like Sir Paul McCartney and wife Nancy Shevell, who are in 198th place with an £865 million fortune, and JK Rowling, who is in 202nd place with a net worth of £850 million.
Mr Kelly, now 64, founded IT company Softcat – which is now regularly voted among the top places to work – back in 1993 and it started out life as a software catalogue, which he reportedly worked on out of his garden shed to get the business off the ground.
The company now employs more than 700 people and, now worth £2 billion, was named the UK’s largest tech reseller by Channel Reseller News last year.
Mr Kelly stepped down from his role as non-executive director of Softcat in October 2015.
Before he created Softcat, Mr Kelly – who has previously described himself as a “weird and eccentric entrepreneur” – dropped out of university then started out in sales at Xerox, according to a profile on Forbes.
A profile in The Business Magazine adds that after joining Rank Xerox in 1981, he went on to set up a recruitment company in 1987, before an Apple dealership in 1988.
Mr Kelly no longer has a major role in Softcat, but unofficial title before he retired was reportedly “minister of fun” and was quoted as saying: “I just care that people are happy.”
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