Julia Margaret Flesher was born in
Des Moines, Iowa, on April 12, 1962. Her family came from a farming background, but when she was born, her parents, Margaret and Frederic Flesher, owned a furniture store called Flesher's. She spent her early childhood in
Indianola, Iowa, then when she was eight years old her family moved to
Conway, Arkansas, where her parents started a clothing store called Peggy Frederic's, which she considered "a beautiful, beautiful shop". By 1998, her mother still lived in Conway but her father had moved back to Indianola. She stopped working in 1993, McCarthy said she was "one of those people who occur in New York every few years...she's beautiful, she loves fashion, she knows how to entertain, she's married to an extraordinarily rich man." Mary Julia is associate opinion editor at
The Wall Street Journal. (left), David Koch (center), and Julia Koch in 2007 Julia and David Koch spent years living in an apartment at
1040 Fifth Avenue, but in 2004 they moved to an 18-room
duplex at
740 Park Avenue. According to ''
740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building'', David Koch bought the apartment for about $17 million from the Japanese government, which previously used it to house their
permanent representative to the United Nations. David Koch died in August 2019, and Julia Koch and their three children inherited 42% of
Koch Industries. As a result, she was listed by
Bloomberg as the richest woman in the world In 2022, Koch put the apartment at 740 Park Avenue on the market; a spokesperson said that she wanted to sell it because she was spending more time at houses in Southampton and
Palm Beach. ==Philanthropy==