Kevin O'Leary

The O'Learys live in Miami Beach, Florida and Toronto, Ontario. He also maintains a cottage in Muskoka, Ontario, as well as homes in Boston and Geneva, Switzerland. In a 2022 CNBC interview, he mentioned that he has obtained a UAE citizenship in order to be able to partner with Emiratis on investments.

In May 2021, O'Leary told Pomp podcast host Anthony Pompliano that he had made a 3 to 5% allocation to bitcoin and had become a strategic investor in the Vancouver-based decentralized finance platform Defi Ventures; the company then renamed itself WonderFi Technologies, in reference to O'Leary's nickname, "Mr. Wonderful".

In August 2021, it was announced O'Leary would take an ownership stake in the parent companies of FTX.com and FTX.US as part of his compensation for becoming a "spokesperson and ambassador" for FTX. FTX subsequently went bankrupt due to CEO Sam Bankman-Fried secretly using client funds to make speculative bets that didn't work out. In November 2022, O'Leary, alongside other spokespeople for FTX, was sued in a class-action lawsuit. There is precedent for prosecuting individuals promoting fraudulent cryptocurrency ventures—regardless of whether they had plausible deniability. For example, in February 2022, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a lawsuit against Bitconnect that the Securities Act of 1933 extends to targeted solicitation using social media. O'Leary claimed on CNBC that he was paid $15 million for the spokesman role, adding that he lost $9.7 million in digital assets, the remainder allotment in various fees and taxes, and a further million dollars' worth of equity after the company's insolvency. At an FTX hearing, O'Leary claimed Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao "put FTX out of business".

In 2021, O'Leary appeared with Katie Phang and Ada Pozo on CNBC's Money Court, where they adjudicated financial disputes.

O'Leary said in a statement that he was cooperating with the police investigation and that the other boat did not have its lights on and "fled the scene". The police stated that both boats left the scene to "attend a location", and both parties called 911." On 24 September, Linda O'Leary was charged with "careless operation of a vessel" under the small vessel regulations of the Canada Shipping Act, a charge that carries maximum 18 months imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. The driver of the other boat, Richard Ruh of Orchard Park, New York, was charged with "failing to exhibit navigation light while underway." On 11 October, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada ruled out jail time for Linda. On 14 September 2021, Linda was found not guilty of careless operation of the vessel.

O'Leary initially expressed skepticism of cryptocurrencies. In May 2019, O'Leary told CNBC bitcoin is "a digital game" and is a "useless currency". He illustrated his thinking with the following example, "Let's say you want to buy a piece of real estate for $10 million in Switzerland...They want a guarantee that the value comes back to the U.S. currency. You have to somehow hedge the risk of bitcoin. That means it's not a real currency. That means the receiver is not willing to take the risk of the volatility it has. It's worthless."

On 24 August 2019, O'Leary and his wife Linda were involved in a fatal crash on Lake Joseph in Muskoka, Ontario when they were on a boat owned by O'Leary and operated at the time by Linda. The O'Leary's boat collided with another one and a 64-year-old man and 48-year old woman on that vessel were killed.

In 2018 O'Leary hosted the podcast Ask Mr. Wonderful for seven episodes. In 2019, he began regularly posting videos on YouTube, again under the title "Ask Mr. Wonderful".

In November 2018, O'Leary hired lawyer Joseph Groia and sued Elections Canada and Canada's federal elections commissioner over campaign finance laws which limited candidates to spending only $25,000 of their own money for their leadership campaign. At the time of the lawsuit, O'Leary still owed $430,000 to creditors. O'Leary had proposed to Elections Canada that he pay off the debt now with his own money and fundraise the money later, but was rebuffed, since this would be illegal. O'Leary publicly stated that the law promoted mediocrity since rich people would be discouraged from running and hurt the businesses that had pledged money for his failed leadership campaign.

In 2017, he campaigned to be the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He was a frontrunner in the polls during much of that time but dropped out in April 2017, one month before the election, citing a lack of support in Quebec.

On 18 January 2017, O'Leary officially entered the Conservative leadership race. That same day, his former Dragons' Den co-star Arlene Dickinson stated that she found O'Leary to be too "self-interested and opportunistic" to be qualified for the office of prime minister. In response, another former Dragons' Den co-star, W. Brett Wilson, endorsed O'Leary, highlighting differences between O'Leary as a businessman and his TV persona.

On 1 February 2017, O'Leary posted a video of himself shooting in a Miami gun range. It was removed from Facebook out of respect for the funeral for three victims of the Quebec City mosque shooting on that day. It was also revealed that he was in New York promoting one of his business ventures when this occurred. O'Leary later apologized for the timing of this post.

O'Leary was a frontrunner in the polls throughout most of his run. Nevertheless, he dropped out of the leadership race on 26 April 2017, stating that, though he still thought he could win the leadership election, a lack of support in Quebec meant that it would be difficult for him to beat Trudeau in 2019, and it would thus be "selfish" of him to continue. On dropping out, he endorsed Bernier, another frontrunner for the position. (Andrew Scheer eventually won the leadership election, narrowly edging out Bernier.)

In a 2017 interview with Evan Solomon, O'Leary suggested that Senators should pay money every year, instead of being paid, thus turning "a cost centre to Canada" into "a profit centre."

In January 2016, O'Leary offered to invest $1 million in the economy of Alberta in exchange for the resignation of Premier Rachel Notley and appeared with four other prospective leadership candidates at a conference for federal Conservatives in late February 2016, where he gave a presentation titled "If I Run, This is How." During his speech, he predicted that the Liberal government would fall within four years of economic collapse.

Following Stephen Harper's resignation as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, O'Leary attended Conservative Party gatherings in February and May 2016, leading to public speculation about whether he would run for 2017 leadership election.

In February 2016, Maxime Bernier, a Conservative Quebecois politician, criticized O'Leary, calling him a "tourist" for wanting to be prime minister without being able to speak French. Bernier later explained that he wanted all leadership candidates to learn French and praised his fellow leadership contender Lisa Raitt, who was trying to improve her French. O'Leary stated that he was taking French lessons, and he promised to learn French in time for the next federal election.

In November 2014, O'Leary Funds Management agreed to pay penalties to the Autorité des marchés financiers for violating certain technical provisions of the Securities Act. At the time of the agreement, O'Leary Funds reported taking steps to correct the violations. On 15 October 2015, O'Leary Funds was sold to Canoe Financial, a private investment-management company owned by Canadian businessman W. Brett Wilson. He once was an investor with O'Leary on CBC's Dragons' Den.

On 14 July 2015, O'Leary launched an ETF through O'Shares Investments, a division of his investment fund, O'Leary Funds Management LP where O'Leary serves as chairman. A value investor, he has advised on personal finance. He advocates portfolio diversification and suggests that investors have their age as the percentage of bonds in their portfolios (i.e., 30% in bonds and 70% in stocks for a 30-year-old investor, with an increasing proportion of bonds and decreasing proportion of stocks as the investor ages). O'Leary has also "stated on many occasions that he won’t invest in publicly-traded stock unless it pays him a dividend."

On 5 May 2015, O'Leary made an appearance on the game show Celebrity Jeopardy and received $10,000 for his charity despite finishing 3rd and in negative points after both Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy rounds. In September that year, O'Leary appeared as a celebrity judge in the 95th Miss America pageant.

O'Leary founded O'Leary Ventures, a private early-stage venture capital investment company, O'Leary Mortgages, O'Leary books, and O'Leary Fine Wines. In April 2014, O'Leary Mortgages closed. O’Leary's funds have a questionable history and are said to have declined over 20% in a year, often a big blow to fund managers. O’Leary no longer manages outside money.

In January 2014, on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, O'Leary remarked, .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}

O'Leary co-produced and hosted the 2012 reality show Redemption Inc., which aired for one season on CBC, in which ten ex-convicts competed to have O'Leary fund their business idea. Having also been a co-host of SqueezePlay on Bell Media's Business News Network (BNN), he returned to the Discovery Channel on 1 September 2014 to join as a contributor for its radio and television stations such as CTV.

O'Leary's appearances on Dragons' Den and Shark Tank popularized the nickname "Mr. Wonderful" for him; he has said that he is often referred to by that name in public. O'Leary has said that the nickname serves both as a tongue-in-cheek reference to his reputation for being mean, as well as a reflection of his view that his blunt assessments are helpful to misguided entrepreneurs. In a 2013 interview, O'Leary implied that he could not remember how he got the nickname. He had already referred to himself as "Mr. Wonderful" in a 2006 casting video for Dragon's Den, predating either show.

In September 2011, O'Leary released his first book, Cold Hard Truth: On Business, Money & Life, in which he shares his views on relationships, investing, money, and life. A sequel, The Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money: 50 Common Money Mistakes and How to Fix Them, was published in 2012. It focused on financial literacy and financial education as foundations for achieving wealth. O'Leary released a follow-up in 2013 in which he covers subjects relating to important life choices: education, careers, marriage and family, and retirement. He discusses the obstacles of raising a family while working to provide financial security for them and advises on developing financial literacy in family members, saving and investing money, and managing debt and credit.

In 2009, the American version of Dragons' Den, Shark Tank, began, and Shark Tank executive producer Mark Burnett invited two of the CBC Dragons' Den investors, O'Leary and Robert Herjavec, to appear on the show. Both have remained with Shark Tank since the beginning. For several years, they appeared on both shows, although Herjavec left Dragons' Den in 2012, and O'Leary left in 2014. Shark Tank became a ratings hit, averaging 9 million viewers per episode at its peak in the 2014–15 season. It has also been a critical favourite, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Structured Reality Program four times.

In 2009, O'Leary began appearing with journalist Amanda Lang on CBC News Network's The Lang and O'Leary Exchange. During a segment of The Lang & O'Leary Exchange on the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, O'Leary criticized Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges for sounding "like a left-wing nutbar." Hedges said afterwards that "it will be the last time" he would appear on the show and compared the CBC to Fox News. CBC's ombudsman found O'Leary's behaviour to be a violation of the public broadcaster's journalistic standards.

In 2009, O'Leary hosted a Winnipeg Comedy Festival gala called Savings & Groans in which he performed a Dragon's Den style sketch in which Sean Cullen and Ron Sparks tried to get him to invest in their invention - the wheel. The show aired on CBC in 2010.

In 2008, O'Leary co-founded O'Leary Funds Inc., a mutual fund company focused on global yield investing. He is the company's chairman and lead investor, while his brother Shane O'Leary serves as the director. The fund's assets under management grew from $400 million in 2011 to $1.2-billion in 2012. The fund's primary manager was Stanton Asset Management, a firm controlled by the husband-and-wife team of Connor O'Brien and Louise Ann Poirier.

In 2008, O'Leary worked as a co-host for the Discovery Channel's Discovery Project Earth, a show that explores innovative ways to reverse climate change.

In March 2007, O'Leary joined the advisory board of Genstar Capital, a private equity firm that focuses on investing in healthcare services, industrial technology, business services, and software. Genstar Capital appointed O'Leary to its Strategic Advisory Board to seek new investment opportunities for its $1.2 billion fund.

In 2006, O'Leary appeared as one of the five follow-up venture capitalists on the then-new show Dragons' Den on CBC, the Canadian installment of the international Dragons' Den format. On the show, O'Leary developed a persona as a blunt, abrasive investor, who at one point told a contestant who started crying, "Money doesn't care. Your tears don't add any value." This television persona was encouraged by executive producer Stuart Coxe, who occasionally asked O'Leary to be "more evil" during the first two seasons. Dragons' Den became one of the most-watched shows in CBC history, with around two million viewers per episode. Coxe attributed the show's success in large part to O'Leary's presence.

In May 2005, Reza Satchu and O'Leary's operating partner, Wheeler, filed a $10-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit, charging that they had altered an agreed-upon compensation deal and illegally reduced Wheeler's share of the profits. O'Leary and Satchu claimed Wheeler failed to reach performance targets. The case was settled out of court.

In 2003, O'Leary became a co-investor and director at StorageNow Holdings, a Canadian developer of climate-controlled storage facilities, a company controlled by Reza Satchu and Asif Satchu. StorageNow became the operator of storage services in Canada, with facilities in 11 cities, and was acquired by Storage REIT in March 2007 for $110 million. He sold his shares, originally worth $500,000, for more than $4.5 million.

In 1999, TLC was acquired by Mattel for US$4.2 billion. Sales and earnings for Mattel soon dropped, and O'Leary was fired. The purchase by Mattel was later called one of the most disastrous acquisitions in recent history. While acquisition management had projected a post-acquisition profit of US$50 million, Mattel actually experienced a loss of US$105 million. Mattel's stock dropped, wiping out US$3 billion of shareholder value in a single day. Mattel's shareholders later filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Mattel executives, O'Leary, and former TLC CEO Michael Perik of misleading investors about the health of TLC and the benefits of its acquisition. The lawsuit alleged that TLC used accounting tricks to hide losses and inflate quarterly revenues. O'Leary and his defendants disputed all of the charges. Mattel paid $122 million to settle the lawsuit in 2003. O'Leary blamed the technology meltdown and a culture clash of management of the two companies for the failure of the acquisition.

TLC lost $105 million (US) in 1998 on revenues of $800 million and suffered losses over the previous two years. TLC bought its former rival Brøderbund in June 1998 for $416 million.

O'Leary and his wife, Linda, have been married since 1990. The couple separated in 2011, but they resumed their marriage after two years. Linda now serves as the VP of Marketing for O'Leary Wines. They have two children. Trevor is an engineer at Tesla, while Savannah is a multimedia producer and filmmaker in New York City. In a 2016 interview, O'Leary stated: "In a successful growing business, it eats your time alive. Then later in life, you can provide for your family things that many others can't have. But because you sacrificed, you're then given the reward of freedom."

After selling his SET share, O'Leary started Softkey in a Toronto basement in 1986, along with business partners John Freeman and Gary Babcock. The company was a publisher and distributor of CD-ROM-based personal computer software for Windows and Macintosh computers. A major financial backer who had committed $250,000 in development capital to the company backed out the day before signing the documents and delivering his cheque, leaving O'Leary looking for funding to support the fledgling business. He used the proceeds from selling his SET share and convinced his mother to lend him $10,000 in seed capital to establish SoftKey Software Products.

O'Leary co-founded SoftKey Software Products, a technology company that sold software geared toward family education and entertainment. During the late 1980s and 1990s, SoftKey acquired rival companies via hostile takeover bids, such as Compton's New Media, The Learning Company, and Broderbund. SoftKey later changed its name to The Learning Company and was acquired by Mattel in 1999, with the sale making O'Leary a multimillionaire. Mattel then fired him after the acquisition which resulted in significant losses and multiple shareholder lawsuits.

The software and personal-computer industries were proliferating in the early 1980s, and O'Leary convinced printer manufacturers to bundle Softkey's program with their hardware. With distribution assured, the company developed several educational software products focused on mathematics and reading education. Softkey products typically consisted of software for home users, especially compilation discs containing various freeware or shareware games packaged in "jewel-case" CD-ROMs.

Softkey weathered stiff competition from other software companies in the late 1980s and prospered throughout the 1990s. By 1993, Softkey had become a major consolidator in the educational software market, acquiring rivals such as WordStar and Spinnaker Software. In 1995, Softkey acquired The Learning Company (TLC) for $606 million, adopting its name, and moved its headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1978, between the first and second years of his MBA program, O'Leary was selected for an internship at Nabisco in Downtown Toronto and then worked as an assistant brand manager for Nabisco's cat food brand. O'Leary credits his later success at The Learning Company to the skills he developed in marketing during his days at Nabisco.

O'Leary had aspired to become a photographer, but on the advice of his stepfather, attended university, where he continued to develop his interest in business and investing. He received an honours bachelor's degree in environmental studies and psychology from the University of Waterloo in 1977 and an MBA in entrepreneurship from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario in 1980.

Terence Thomas Kevin O'Leary (born 9 July 1954), also known as Mr. Wonderful, is a Canadian businessman, entrepreneur, and television personality. From 2004 to 2014, he appeared on various Canadian television shows. These include the business news programmes SqueezePlay and The Lang and O'Leary Exchange, as well as the reality television shows Dragons' Den and Redemption Inc. In 2008, he appeared on Discovery Channel's Project Earth. Since 2009, he has appeared on Shark Tank, the American version of Dragons' Den.

O'Leary was born on 9 July 1954, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, one of two sons of Georgette (née Bukalam), a small-business owner and investor of Lebanese descent, and Terry O'Leary, a salesman of Irish descent. Kevin's brother is Shane O'Leary. Due to his paternal heritage, O'Leary also holds Irish citizenship and carries an Irish passport. O'Leary had dyslexia which he argued helped him in the world of business.