Meet the two billion-heirs in the hunt at PGA Championship

Families of Maverick McNealy and Kristoffer Reitan have large fortunes

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Published May 16, 2026  •  3 minute read

Maverick McNealy, left, and Kristoffer Reitan, right, compete in the third round of the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown, Pa., Saturday, on May 16, 2026. Photo by Emilee Chinn / Andrew Redington /Getty Images

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — There’s a lot of money on the line this week at the PGA Championship, but for two players on the leaderboard at Aronimink Golf Club the $3.89 million winner’s cheque would amount to little more than a rounding error to their family fortune.

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Overnight leader Maverick McNealy has earned $22.5 million on the PGA Tour and has been ranked as high as 10th in the world.

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“This is obviously new territory for me,” McNealy said after Friday’s round of co-leading a major. “But I am confident that it’s going to go into the experience bank, and good or bad, I’m going to learn a lot from it.

“And really excited to test my game in ways it hasn’t been tested before, and I think this is the next step for me as a professional is competing and playing well in this type of tournament.”

A decade ago, though, the Stanford business grad was torn between pursuing a life as a pro golfer and a potential career in investment banking.

McNealy’s father co-founded Sun Microsystems

It’s quite likely that doors in the boardroom would have opened quickly for the whip-smart McNealy, considering his father Scott McNealy is co-founder of Sun Microsystems. As CEO of the company, the elder McNealy oversaw the company’s 2010 sale to Oracle for a reported $7.4 billion. McNealy has an estimated net worth of $1 billion and last year sold the family’s California home (complete with a hockey rink) for $35 million.

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McNealy, 30, and his three brothers were avid hockey players growing up and all played for the San Jose Junior Sharks minor hockey team.

Last week, many PGA Tour golf fans were introduced to another billionaire heir, when Norway’s Kristoffer Reitan took home $3.6 million for winning the Truist Championship, an elevated event played at Quail Hollow in North Carolina.

Reitan’s grandfather started retail business

Reitan, 28, might not have been a familiar name to most North Americans, but back home he might be right up there with Elsa and Anna with an estimated family fortune of $9 billion. His grandfather Odd Reitan started a retail business that includes over 1,000 stores, and his sister Viktoria Reitan is a popular singer in Norway.

Four years ago, disillusioned with the game, Reitan seriously considered giving up his dreams of playing professional golf. His fallback plan wasn’t the family business, however it was YouTube golf.

“I just had some thoughts about how to make the game a little bit more fun, a little bit more relaxed,” Reitan said last week after his win. “I was just trying to find ways to make it more fun to give my journey in golf a little bit of energy, and trying to have fun while I’m playing so that I can endure the hardships that follow, yeah, with professional golf.

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“I’ve got some friends that are trying to break through, at least in the Norwegian space, which is obviously significantly less than the international space, but still I try to tag along with them a little bit on one of their episodes,” he added. “So, yeah, it was just something I was playing around with and I actually had some serious chats with some production companies to try and maybe bring it to fruition, but, yeah, just never really got there.”

If McNealy and Reitan end up in the same group on Sunday, what are the chances they add a little side game to make it worth their while?

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