John Thomas Walton was born on October 8, 1946 in New Port, Arkansas, USA, and had an inflation-adjusted net worth of $21 billion at the time of his death. The son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and a United States war veteran, he served as the chairman of True North Partners, a venture capital firm.

John Walton was a graduate of Bentonville High School, where he was a star football player. He then attended the College of Wooster, but dropped out of college in 1968 to focus on playing the flute.

Walton also enlisted in the U.S. Army after the Vietnamese Tet Offensive. He served in the Green Berets as part of the Studies and Observation Group. He was also involved in combat in the A Shalu Valley and in Laos, where he was the medic and second-in-command of a unit named “Spike Team Louisiana” which earned him a Silver Star for bravery in combat.

When John returned from Vietnam, he learned to fly and worked as a pilot at Wal-Mart instead of being involved in the management of the family business. He then left the company to fly crop-dusters over cotton fields in various southern states. He also co-funded Satloc, an aerial application company that pioneered the use of GPS technology in agricultural crop-dusting.

John Walton later moved to San Diego and founded Corsair Marine, a company that built trimaran sailboats. He used to live in Durango, Colorado, where he enjoyed skiing, mountain biking, hiking, motorcycle riding, skydiving and scuba diving.

Along with friend Ted Forstmann, he established the Children’s Scholarship Fund in 1998 as part of the Philanthropy Roundtable. It aims to provide tuition assistance for low-income families to send their children to private schools. He was also an advocate of school vouchers. With his philanthropic works and achievements, he received the William E. Simon Prize Philanthropic Leadership.

On June 27, 2005, he died when his CGS Hawk Arrow homebuilt aircraft that he was piloting crashed in Jackson, Wyoming. It was registered as an “experimental aircraft” under FAA regulations which crashed shortly after taking off from Jackson Hole Airport.