Stewart Resnick

Stewart Allen Resnick (born December 24, 1936) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the president and chairman of The Wonderful Company, a privately held company he owns with his wife Lynda Resnick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick

• While in law school, he founded his first business, a janitorial services company, which he sold in 1969.
• With the money he made from his first company, Resnick bought The Franklin Mint
• Since 1979 Resnick has been president and chairman of The Wonderful Company, formerly known as Roll Global, which owns many businesses in Central California and beyond. Through this holding company he and his wife own the POM Wonderful and Fiji Water brands, Wonderful Halos, Wonderful Pistachios and Almonds, JUSTIN Wines, Landmark Wines, JNSQ Wines, Suterra Pest Control and the Teleflora floral wire service company
• During the 2011–2017 California drought—also called the Great Drought—Resnick's Paramount Farms, which is part of the Wonderful Company, drilled twenty-one new wells in 2015 alone. Resnick is the wealthiest farmer in the United States, with a net worth exceeding nine billion dollars
• owns a majority stake in the Kern Water Bank, one of California's largest underground water storage facilities, which is capable of storing 500 billion gallons [1.9 billion m3]. The Kern Water Bank, though privately owned, profits from water sales through publicly funded water transportation systems. The acquisition, continuing private ownership, and water sales profit from this taxpayer-developed resource infrastructure, while California suffers under drought, is controversial.
• They have partnered with the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project to bring water to Kern County, having spent $35 million in recent years buying up more water from nearby districts to replenish the Central Valley's supplies.
• In 2015, it was revealed that the Resnicks and other farmers had been watering their orchards with treated fracking waste water
• In September 2019, Resnick and his wife pledged their largest donation to date, a $750 million endowment to California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for climate change research.