Today the company is held in equal parts by the sons, who are worth around $940 million apiece, based on Forbes’ calculations. She stepped down from the company’s board in 2007 and transferred the shares to her two sons, Stefan and Jürgen. According to Michaela Adams, Wirtgen group’s spokesperson, his widow Gisela Wirtgen built the company with her husband and took over the helm after his sudden death in a car accident in 1997. Reinhard Wirtgen founded the company in 1961 when he was only 19. Forbes estimates that the company, which is wholly owned by the sons of the late founder Reinhard Wirtgen, is conservatively worth nearly $1.9 billion, based on an analysis of comparable publicly traded companies such as Caterpillar, Deere & Company, Hitachi Construction Machinery and Komatsu.
The other newly uncovered German billionaire family is the one behind Wirtgen group, one of the world’s largest privately held heavy equipment manufacturers with more than $2.2 billion in revenues last year and 6,5000 employees around the globe. The gaming outfit – and family - is worth at least $2.1 billion, based on Forbes’ analysis using conservative price-to sales-metrics of publicly traded companies such as Sankyo Co, Sega Sammy Holdings, Heiwa Corporation and Dynam Japan. What started as a modest business transformed into a coin-op machine empire that today does nearly $1.3 billion in sales and employs 8,000 people in Germany and Europe. He also apparently had a role in developing the first electronic cigarette vending machine made in Germany. Among his creations: a remote control for German juke boxes– the first of his 300 patents to-date. Around that time he also began inventing things. A year later he decided to operate juke boxes himself in his spare time. In 1956 he apparently got himself a job as a technician for the importer of American Wurlitzer juke boxes.
But a friend who worked in the amusement industry helped spark his interest in the gaming sector. He initially started out as a telecoms inspector. Gauselmann, who has been called the pope of the amusement business, was born in 1934, the son of a craftsman.
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