Jacob Rothschild is a British investor and has an estimated net worth of $5 billion. He is a member of the Rothschild family, who established a banking business in the 1760s. Rothschild is the founder and President of RIT Capital and until 2019, he was its Chairman. RIT  is an investment trust listed on the London Stock Exchange, and he owns 29.4 million shares of the company, which is 19% of total stocks, equal to $864 million. Rothschild has received numerous awards and orders of merit, the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) the most notable of them.

During his time as Chairman at RIT, Rothschild earned a salary ranging from $300,000 to $2.7 million from 2010 to 2019. The company has a market capitalization of $5.25 billion: total assets of $3.14 billion and had profits of $339.8 million in 2019.

Besides that, Rothschild also co-founded other companies, among which stand out is St James's Place, a publicly-traded firm involved in real estate with a market capitalization of $9.75 billion. His last known investments were at Viagogo, an online event ticket platform for resales, for $30 million in 2007 and $15 million in 2009, and at OneDome, a property marketplace, for $4 million in 2017.

Rothschild was born on April 29, 1936, as Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild. He is the eldest son of Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild, by his first wife Barbara Judith Hutchinson. His father was a biologist and botanist who worked for the domestic counter-intelligence and security agency MI5 during WWII in the explosives and sabotage section, and his great-grandfather was a banker who became the first Jewish member of the House of Lords. Rothschild lived the war years as a child at Tring, a town in the Borough of Dacorum, Hertfordshire. He then attended Eton College High School and later to Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford where obtained the highest academic achievement after studied history.

Rothschild worked at the family bank N. M. Rothschild & Sons in London from 1963 to 1980, when he resigned because of a family dispute, though he later took control of the Rothschild Investment Trust and named RIT Capital since 1988. In 1991, he founded J. Rothschild Assurance Group, now St. James Place, along with Mark Weinberg.

In 2003, Rothschild began to get involved with petroleum when bought shares of the Russian oil and gas company YUKOS. In 2006, he was named a Founding Partner and Advisory Board Member of Xander Real Estate. Rothschild is also a member of the Council for the Duchy of Cornwall for HRH The Prince of Wales, and a member of the International Advisory Board of The Blackstone Group. Furthermore, he was Deputy Chairman of BSkyB Corporation and a Director of RHJ International until 2008. In 2010, an unrevealed entity affiliated with Rothschild purchased a 5% equity of Genie Energy for $10 million. Three years later, Genie was granted exclusive oil and gas exploration rights to a 153-square mile radius in the southern side of the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory occupied by Israel.

Rothschild has also been significantly connected to philanthropy and the arts. He was Chairman of Trustees of the National Gallery from 1985 to 1991, and Chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund from 1992 to 1998. From 1994 to 1998, Rothschild was Chairman of the British National Heritage Lottery Fund, responsible for distributing the proceeds of the National Lottery, an influential position that oversaw the distribution of $1.65 billion in grants. In addition, he had been a trustee at the Ashmolean Museum, the Courtauld Institute, the National Gallery, the Qatar Museum Authority, and the State Hermitage Museum, as well as fellow at the British Academy, the City of Jerusalem, the Israel Museum, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Moreover, Rothschild serves as Chairman at Yad Hanadiv, a Rothschild family philanthropic foundation located in Israel focused on education, the environment, and the Arabic community.

In 1961, Rothschild married Serena Mary Dunn, a granddaughter of the Canadian financier James Dunn, and they have four children; Hannah Mary, Beth Matilda, Emily Magda, and Nathaniel Philip Victor James.

Sources: Bloomberg, Market Screener, RIT Capital, RIT Capital (2), RIT Capital (3), RIT Capital (4), RIT Capital (5), RIT Capital (6), London Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange (2), Crunchbase, People Pill, Forbes, Yad Hanadiv.

This article was updated on April 8, 2021 by Andrés Taurian

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