Chief Executive Officer & Partner, Legatum
Mark Stoleson is the Chief Executive Officer and a Partner of Legatum, a global investment firm based in Dubai. Together with his three partners, Mark helped shape Legatum’s mission which is “to generate and allocate the capital and ideas that help people prosper”. Over the last 16 years Mark and his partners have worked together with an amazing team to execute on Legatum’s mission by building a world class investment fund while pioneering a number of high impact philanthropic endeavors.
Legatum’s investment business manages only the proprietary capital of its partners, with the majority invested in publicly traded equities in multiple markets around the world. Legatum maintains a very concentrated, high-conviction portfolio of only our best ideas, focusing on the financial services, consumer and technology sectors. With the approach of business owners, Legatum evaluates success by measuring growth in intrinsic value over years rather than share price performance over quarters, leading to an average holding period of over 3 years.
Legatum’s key philanthropic endeavors include the END Fund (the world’s leading privately funded de-worming campaign which has distributed over $1 billion in medicine and facilitated over 720 million treatments across 27 countries), the Freedom Fund (a leader in combatting human trafficking and modern day slavery with nearly 25,000 people directly liberated from slavery), Luminos (an accelerated learning platform for returning out of school children to the classroom with over 130,000 kids successfully back in school to date), The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT (focusing on the nexus between entrepreneurship and national prosperity and raising up a generation of entrepreneur leaders in low income countries), and the Legatum Institute Foundation in London (focusing on research and policy solutions that drive pathways from poverty to prosperity).
Prior to Legatum, Mark was a corporate finance and M&A attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Dallas, Texas and Moscow, Russia. He earned a BA in International Relations from Occidental College and a JD-LLM from Duke University School of Law.
Mark is originally from Phoenix, Arizona. He currently lives in Dubai with Katherine, his wife of 24 years and their Hungarian Viszla “Libby”. Mark and Katherine have two grown sons who live in the US.