Gene Haas is the founder, president, and sole stockholder of Haas Automation with an estimated net worth of $250 million. Born Gene Francis Haas on November 12, 1952, he holds B.S. in Accounting and Finance from California State University Northridge in 1975.

Haas began earning his estimated net worth of $250 million while working as a machinist and computer numerical control (CNC) programmer. In 1978, he opened a small machine shop, Pro-turn Engineering, with two employees. After observing that one of them took a long time to manually position an indexer, he built his own indexer with a stepping motor drive. He built one for himself as well as for other machine shops. He displayed his indexer at the WESTEC industry expo and after seeing the positive reaction of the attendees, he decided to form Haas Automation to mass produce the machine. Today, it is the largest machine tool builder in the western world. It manufactures a complete line of CNC vertical machine centers, horizontal machine centers, CNC lathes, and rotary products.

Gene Haas also founded a NASCAR team, Haas CNC Racing, which is now known as Stewart-Haas Racing after he joined forces with NASCAR driver Tony Stewart. Ryan Newman also drives for the team who won at Phoenix in 2010.