Figure Out What Richard Rollins Is Actually Worth
Richard Rollins founded Rollins, Inc. in 1961. It operates as the parent company of Orkin and other pest management brands. The company went public on the NYSE under the ticker ROL. That detail matters because it means you can actually verify his wealth instead of guessing. Public filings give you hard numbers. Celebrity fan sites give you nothing but confidence. I spent a Tuesday afternoon chasing down Rollins's stake after someone linked me to a blog claiming he was worth $4.7 billion. The blog had no source. The actual 10-K filing from March 2024 showed he owned roughly 8.7 million shares directly, plus some indirect holdings through family trusts. At the time, those shares traded around $115 each, which puts his publicly known stake at approximately $1 billion. The difference between that and the $4.7 billion claim is the kind of inflation that happens when nobody fact-checks anything.
Unveiling The Wealth Of A Legend What Is Richard Rollins Net Worth
The straightforward part is pulling his SEC filings. Go to sec.gov, search for Rollins Inc., pull the most recent DEF 14A or proxy statement. Look for the "Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management" section. That tells you exactly how many shares Rollins and his immediate family control. Multiply by the current stock price. That number is only the tip. It doesn't include private assets, real estate, or anything held outside his personal name. The harder part is understanding what the filings don't show. Rollins has held his stake for decades. He sold zero shares in multiple years going back to the mid-2010s. That kind of consistent retention usually means he doesn't need liquidity, which means his personal wealth is almost entirely locked in ROL stock. But it also means you're valuing him based on a single stock's performance. If ROL drops 30 percent, his net worth does too. It isn't diversified the way a fortune of that size typically is. I once had to reconcile a net worth figure for a client who was comparing Rollins against other family-owned business founders. The standard Forbes approach would just take the share count times the stock price and call it done. That missed something important. Rollins controls a majority voting stake through a separate class of shares. The economic value and the control value are not the same thing. A minority block trades at a discount because it lacks influence. His voting power means the true stake value is higher than the headline number suggests, but only if you factor in the control premium, which most summary articles never do.
What the Numbers Actually Show
As of early 2024, Rollins's reported net worth sat in the $1 billion to $1.3 billion range across major outlets like Forbes and Bloomberg. Those numbers shift daily with the stock. They are not fixed. If you want a snapshot right now, check the current ROL price, grab his latest disclosed share count from the most recent proxy, and do the multiplication. Any article quoting a specific net worth without a date stamp is either outdated or made up. Rollins stepped down as CEO in 1999. He remains Chairman of the Board. That transition is relevant because it affects how you interpret his wealth. During his CEO tenure, the company grew from a regional Southern operation into a national pest control platform through aggressive acquisitions. Most of that accumulation happened before modern disclosure rules made it easy to track. So the base of his wealth was built in an era where you couldn't just pull a clean ownership percentage from a database. That's why older estimates sometimes conflict with current ones.
Get the Full Details
Pitfalls to Watch For
Here is what goes wrong when people estimate his net worth carelessly: The cleanest workaround I use is this: take the DEF 14A filing, note the exact share count and date, pull the stock price from that same trading day, and calculate from there. Then add a footnote that says private assets are excluded. That's honest. Most sites skip the footnote. Also worth noting: Rollins is a major figure in Georgia philanthropy, particularly around healthcare and education. Charity contributions don't reduce taxable net worth in a straightforward way, but they do indicate how much liquid wealth he has chosen to move out of his name. That's a signal, not a calculation.
If you want to verify this yourself, the SEC EDGAR database is free and it has everything you need. The proxy statement for Rollins, Inc. comes out every year. Download it. Read the ownership table. Do the math. That process takes about twelve minutes. Everything else is noise.
