Robert Kraft: Owner of the New England Patriots and Chairman of the Kraft Group
Business Owner · Sports & Entertainment
Robert Kraft took control of a packaging company through a 1968 leveraged buyout, founded International Forest Products and has owned the New England Patriots since 1994.
About Robert Kraft: Owner of the New England Patriots and Chairman of the Kraft Group
Robert Hearth Kenneth Kraft (born June 5, 1941, in Brookline, Massachusetts) is an American businessman, the chairman and CEO of the Kraft Group, a diversified holding company with assets in paper and packaging, sports and entertainment, real estate development and private equity. He has owned the NFL's New England Patriots since 1994, and owns Major League Soccer's New England Revolution, which he founded in 1996. In 2017 he founded the Boston Uprising, an Overwatch League esports team that competed until it disbanded in January 2024. As of July 2024 Forbes estimated his net worth at US$11.1 billion. Kraft is the son of Sarah Bryna Webber and Harry Kraft, a dress manufacturer in Boston's Chinatown, in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family; his father, a lay leader at Congregation Kehillath Israel, wanted him to become a rabbi. As a child he sold newspapers outside Braves Field. He attended Columbia University on an academic scholarship and served as class president. He met Myra Hiatt in Boston's Back Bay in 1962, married her in June 1963, graduated from Columbia that year and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1965. Kraft began his career at the Rand-Whitney Group, a Worcester packaging company run by his father-in-law, Jacob Hiatt, and in 1968 gained control of it through a leveraged buyout; he remains chairman. In 1972 he founded International Forest Products, a trader of physical paper commodities, on a hunch that growth in international communications and transportation would expand global trade. The two combined companies make up the largest privately held paper and packaging business in the United States, and International Forest Products ranked No. 7 on the Journal of Commerce's list of exporters and importers in 2001. Sources: English Wikipedia (Robert Kraft, accessed September 2026).
Basic Information
Chairman and CEO, The Kraft Group; owner, New England Patriots and New England Revolution
Company Details
The Kraft Group
Paper and Packaging, Sports Ownership, Real Estate
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