Kevin O'Leary

O'Leary was born on 9 July 1954, in Montreal, one of two sons of Georgette (; ), a small-business owner and investor of Lebanese descent, and Terry O'Leary, a salesman of Irish descent. Kevin also has a brother, Shane O'Leary. Due to his paternal heritage, O'Leary also holds Irish citizenship and carries an Irish passport. O'Leary has dyslexia, which he argued helped him in the world of business by fostering out-of-the-box thinking. O'Leary grew up in Mount Royal, Quebec. After his father's death, his mother ran the family's clothing business as an executive. His mother later married an economist, George Kanawaty, who worked with the UN's International Labour Organization. His stepfather's international assignments caused the family to move frequently, and O'Leary lived in many places while growing up, including Cambodia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Cyprus. In his youth, he met both Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Pol Pot of Cambodia. O'Leary attended Stanstead College and St. George's School, both in Quebec. O'Leary had aspired to become a photographer, but on the advice of his stepfather, who prompted the young Kevin to be more realistic with his future career aspirations, decided to attend university, He received an honours bachelor's degree in environmental studies and psychology from the University of Waterloo in 1977 and an MBA in entrepreneurship from Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario in 1980. ==Business career==

In 1978, between the first and second years of his MBA program, O'Leary was selected for an internship at Nabisco in Downtown Toronto and then worked as an assistant brand manager for Nabisco's cat food brand. O'Leary attributed his future business success at The Learning Company as a result of the extensive marketing skills that he honed during his assistant brand management days at Nabisco. After leaving Nabisco, O'Leary began a brief career as a television producer. With two of his former MBA classmates, Scott Mackenzie and Dave Toms (both of whom had assisted on O'Leary's MBA documentary), O'Leary co-founded Special Event Television (SET). SET was an independent television production company that produced original sports programming such as The Original Six, ''Don Cherry's Grapevine, and Bobby Orr & The Hockey Legends''. The company achieved limited success with minor television shows, soccer films, sports documentaries, and short in-between-period commercials for local professional hockey games. One of his partners later bought out his share of the venture for $25,000. As the software and personal-computer industries were proliferating throughout the course of the early 1980s, O'Leary convinced printer manufacturers to bundle Softkey's program with their hardware. With distribution assured, the company developed several educational software products focused on mathematics and reading education. Softkey products typically consisted of software for home users, especially compilation discs containing various freeware or shareware games packaged in "jewel-case" CD-ROMs. In 1995, Softkey acquired The Learning Company (TLC) for $606 million, adopting its name, and moved its headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts. TLC lost $105 million (US) in 1998 on revenues of $800 million and suffered losses over the previous two years. TLC bought its former rival Broderbund in June 1998 for $416 million. In 1999, TLC was acquired by Mattel for US$4.2 billion. While acquisition management had projected a post-acquisition profit of US$50 million, Mattel actually experienced a loss of US$105 million. Mattel's stock dropped, wiping out US$3 billion of shareholder value in a single day. Mattel's shareholders later filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Mattel executives, O'Leary, and former TLC CEO Michael Perik of misleading investors about the health of TLC and the benefits of its acquisition. The lawsuit alleged that TLC used accounting tricks to hide losses and inflate quarterly revenues. In response, O'Leary and his defendants disputed all of the charges, with Mattel later paying $122 million to settle the lawsuit in 2003. O'Leary blamed the technology meltdown and a culture clash between the management of the two companies for the failure of the acquisition. O'Leary and financial backers from Citigroup made an unsuccessful attempt to acquire the French video game company Atari, with O'Leary having made plans to start a video-gaming television channel which never materialized. StorageNow became the largest operator of storage services in Canada, with facilities in 11 cities, and was acquired by Storage REIT in March 2007 for $110 million. The case was settled out of court. O'Leary Funds In 2008, O'Leary co-founded O'Leary Funds Inc., a mutual fund management firm focused on global yield investing. He is the company's chairman and lead investor, while his brother, Shane O'Leary, serves as a director. The fund's assets under management grew from $400 million in 2011 to $1.2 billion in 2012. The fund's primary manager was Stanton Asset Management, a firm controlled by the husband-and-wife team of Connor O'Brien and Louise Ann Poirier. Another analysis also found that one-quarter of the distributions from one of O'Leary's funds were return of capital. On October 15, 2015, O'Leary Funds was sold to Canoe Financial, a private investment-management company owned by Canadian businessman W. Brett Wilson. Wilson was once an investor with O'Leary on CBC's ''Dragons' Den.'' O'Leary Ventures O'Leary is also the founder of O'Leary Ventures, a private early-stage venture capital investment company, O'Leary Mortgages, O'Leary books, and O'Leary Fine Wines. In April 2014, O'Leary Mortgages closed. O'Leary's funds have a questionable history and are said to have declined over 20% in a year, often a big blow to fund managers. O'Leary no longer manages outside money. ETF and investing On July 14, 2015, O'Leary launched an Exchange-traded fund (ETF) through O'Shares Investments, a division of his investment fund, O'Leary Funds Management LP, where O'Leary serves as chairman. A value investor, he has advised on personal finance. He advocates portfolio diversification and suggests that investors have their age as the percentage of bonds in their portfolios (i.e., 30% in bonds and 70% in stocks for a 30-year-old investor, with an increasing proportion of bonds and decreasing proportion of stocks as the investor ages). O'Leary is also an active gold investor, with five percent of his financial portfolio invested in physical gold. However, he does not invest in stocks of gold-mining companies because he says cash flow is an important investment factor to him. O'Leary also advises diversification in multiple industry sectors while dedicating no more than 20 percent of one's financial portfolio being concentrated in one sector. Cryptocurrency O'Leary initially expressed skepticism about cryptocurrency, describing bitcoin as "a digital game" and "useless currency" in 2019. He illustrated his thinking with the following example, "Let's say you want to buy a piece of Swiss real estate for $10 million in bitcoin...The seller wants a guarantee that the bitcoin value comes back to the U.S. currency. You have to somehow hedge the risk of bitcoin. That means it's not a real currency. That means the receiver is not willing to take the risk of the volatility it has. It's worthless." In May 2021, O'Leary said he had made a 3 to 5% allocation to bitcoin and had become a strategic investor in the Vancouver-based decentralized finance platform Defi Ventures; the company then renamed itself WonderFi Technologies, in reference to O'Leary's nickname, "Mr. Wonderful". In August 2021, it was announced O'Leary would take an ownership stake in the parent companies of FTX.com and FTX.US as part of his compensation for becoming a "spokesperson and ambassador" for FTX. FTX subsequently went bankrupt due to CEO Sam Bankman-Fried secretly using client funds to make speculative bets that were unsuccessful. In November 2022, O'Leary, alongside other spokespeople for FTX, was sued in a class-action lawsuit. There is precedent for prosecuting individuals promoting fraudulent cryptocurrency ventures—regardless of whether they had plausible deniability. For example, in February 2022, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a lawsuit against Bitconnect that the Securities Act of 1933 extends to targeted solicitation using social media. O'Leary claimed on CNBC that he was paid $15 million for the spokesman role, adding that he lost $9.7 million in digital assets, the remainder allotment in various fees and taxes, and a further million dollars' worth of equity after the company's insolvency. At an FTX hearing, O'Leary claimed that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao "put FTX out of business." O'Leary has been an advocate of cryptocurrency investing and personally owns coins in the cryptocurrencies Ether, A4M Ethereum Blockchain, Polygon, SOL, Bitcoin, and Pawthereum. Project Stratos In April of 2026, O'Leary announced a joint venture between ''O'Leary Digital'' and Utah's Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) to construct a large data-center campus and energy infrastructure in Box Elder County, Utah. The venture, the Stratos Project, would span roughly 40,000 acres across multiple sites in the arid region north of The Great Salt Lake. At full capacity the project is estimated to consume up to 9 gigawatts of electricity (more than double Utah's current consumption). Citing energy concerns, the project would operate off-grid, generating its own energy by tapping into the nearby Ruby Pipeline. Local residents and scientists have raised concerns relating to the projects potential energy and water use, emissions, as well as its overall environmental impact. As of May 4th 2026, Box Elder County officials have green-lit the projects proposal. ==Books==

• Cold Hard Truth: On Business, Money & Life (2011) • Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money: 50 Common Money Mistakes and How to Fix Them (2012) • Cold Hard Truth on Family, Kids and Money (2015) • Cold Hard Truth on Marriage and Money: Part Two of Cold Hard Truth on Family, Kids and Money (2015) • Digital Pivot or Bust In a Post COVID-19 World: Why Small Businesses Must Re-Think Everything to Survive and Thrive! (2020) ==Media==

''Dragons' Den and Shark Tank'' In 2006, O'Leary appeared as one of the five follow-up venture capitalists on the then-new show ''Dragons' Den on CBC, the Canadian installment of the international Dragons' Den'' format. On the show, O'Leary developed a persona as a blunt, abrasive investor, who at one point told a contestant who started crying, "Money doesn't care. Your tears don't add any value." This television persona was encouraged by executive producer Stuart Coxe, who occasionally asked O'Leary to be "more evil" during the first two seasons. ''Dragons' Den'' became one of the most-watched shows in CBC history, with around two million viewers per episode. It has also been a critical favourite, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Structured Reality Program four times. O'Leary's appearances on ''Dragons' Den and Shark Tank'' popularized the nickname "Mr. Wonderful" for him; he has said that he is often referred to by that name in public. O'Leary has said that the nickname serves both as a tongue-in-cheek reference to his reputation for being mean, as well as a reflection of his view that his blunt assessments are helpful to misguided, naive, and inexperienced entrepreneurs. In a 2013 interview, O'Leary implied that he could not remember how he got the nickname. Besides his acerbic demeanor, domineering imposition, and blunt television persona, O'Leary has also gained a reputation on both shows for preferring deals in which he loans the entrepreneurs money in exchange for a percentage of future revenue, rather than taking a share of the company. Notable deals in which O'Leary has been involved on Shark Tank include investments in Talbott Teas (later bought by Jamba Juice) and GrooveBook (later bought by Shutterfly), the latter with Mark Cuban. Some of his recent investments include Hello Prenup with Nirav Tolia of Nextdoor. All of his ''Dragons' Den and Shark Tank'' investments are consolidated, presided, and managed under his holding company, called "Something Wonderful." The Lang and O'Leary Exchange In 2009, O'Leary began appearing with journalist Amanda Lang on CBC News Network's ''The Lang and O'Leary Exchange. During a segment of The Lang & O'Leary Exchange'' on the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, O'Leary criticized Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges for sounding "like a left-wing nutbar." Hedges said afterward that "it will be the last time" he would appear on the show and compared the CBC to Fox News. CBC's ombudsman found O'Leary's behaviour to be a violation of the public broadcaster's journalistic standards. In January 2014, on ''The Lang and O'Leary Exchange'', O'Leary remarked, O'Leary later clarified these statements, saying, Other projects In 2009, O'Leary hosted a Winnipeg Comedy Festival gala called Savings & Groans in which he performed a ''Dragon's Den'' style sketch in which Sean Cullen and Ron Sparks tried to get him to invest in their invention - the wheel. The show aired on CBC in 2010. O'Leary co-produced and hosted the 2012 reality show Redemption Inc., which aired for one season on CBC, in which ten ex-convicts competed to have O'Leary fund their business idea. On May 5, 2015, O'Leary made an appearance on the game show Celebrity Jeopardy and received $10,000 for his charity despite finishing 3rd and in negative points after both Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy rounds. In September that year, O'Leary appeared as a celebrity judge in the 95th Miss America pageant. In 2018 O'Leary hosted the podcast Ask Mr. Wonderful for seven episodes. In 2019, he began posting videos on YouTube, again under the title "Ask Mr. Wonderful". In 2021, O'Leary appeared with Katie Phang and Ada Pozo on CNBC's Money Court, where they adjudicated financial disputes. He is currently a member of ARHT Media's Board of Advisors. O'Leary made his acting debut in the 2025 movie Marty Supreme. He plays Milton Rockwell, a pen magnate who invites protagonist Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) to participate in an exhibition ping pong game. ==Filmography==

In January 2016, O'Leary offered to invest $1 million in the economy of Alberta in exchange for the resignation of Premier Rachel Notley and appeared with four other prospective leadership candidates at a conference for federal Conservatives in late February 2016, where he gave a presentation titled "If I Run, This is How." During his speech, he predicted that the Liberal government would fall within four years of economic collapse. 2017 federal Conservative Party leadership race in 2018 Following Stephen Harper's resignation as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, O'Leary attended Conservative Party gatherings in February and May 2016, leading to public speculation about whether he would run for the 2017 leadership election. In February 2016, Maxime Bernier, a Conservative Quebecois politician, criticized O'Leary, calling him a "tourist" for wanting to be prime minister without being able to speak French. Bernier later explained that he wanted all leadership candidates to learn French and praised his fellow leadership contender Lisa Raitt, who was trying to improve her French. O'Leary stated that he was taking French lessons, and he promised to learn French in time for the next federal election. On January 18, 2017, O'Leary officially entered the Conservative leadership race. In response, another former ''Dragons' Den'' co-star, W. Brett Wilson, endorsed O'Leary, highlighting differences between O'Leary as a businessman and his TV persona. On February 1, 2017, O'Leary posted a video of himself shooting in a Miami gun range. It was removed from Facebook out of respect for the funeral for three victims of the Quebec City mosque shooting on that day. It was also revealed that he was in New York promoting one of his business ventures when this occurred. O'Leary later apologized for the timing of this post. O'Leary was a frontrunner in the polls throughout most of his run. Nevertheless, he dropped out of the leadership race on April 26, 2017, stating that, though he still thought he could win the leadership election, a lack of support in Quebec meant that it would be difficult for him to beat Trudeau in 2019, and it would thus be "selfish" of him to continue. On dropping out, he endorsed Bernier, another frontrunner for the position. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, O'Leary criticized Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, citing her plan to increase corporate taxes. During the campaign, O'Leary also defended Trump for bank fraud, suggesting that it was a victimless crime. After Donald Trump won the election, O'Leary said he was very happy with the outcome and that he was "very proud of the work [he] did" during the campaign. O'Leary also supported making Canada part of the United States and said, "Think about the power of combining the two economies." Economy and trade O'Leary supports multilateral free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. O'Leary believes corporate tax rates in Canada are too high and has promised to eliminate the national carbon tax. O'Leary has threatened to punish provinces by withholding transfer payments if they do not eliminate their respective carbon taxes. O'Leary opposes control of the CRTC over Canada's telecommunications system. He has accused Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York politician, of "killing jobs by the thousands," citing higher corporate taxes which she favors. O'Leary supports the Trump administration's Liberation Day tariffs policy and has called for increasing United States' tariffs on China to 400%. Labor rights O'Leary opposes right to disconnect legislation, which gives employees the legal right not to respond to work-related communications outside of working hours. O'Leary has advocated for employers not hiring people who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, saying that "these people are screwed" and that employers could use AI to identify protesters during background checks of prospective employees. Energy O'Leary supports building a pipeline from the Athabasca oil sands to Eastern Canada with the intention of making Canada "energy independent". He has criticized Canada's reliance on Saudi Arabia for oil and gas. He has stated he would support a national referendum on the issue of pipelines. Social O'Leary describes his social policies as "very liberal". He supports same-sex marriage. O'Leary supports the legalization and regulation of marijuana. Foreign and military policy O'Leary supported ending Canadian airstrikes on ISIS and supports taking a peacekeeping role in the Syrian Civil War. In 2017, O'Leary described Russia as "neither an ally nor a foe" in an interview with the CBC. O'Leary has criticized Justin Trudeau's procurement plan. He supports purchasing aerial combat drones to defend Canadian airspace and supports phasing out the use of the Lockheed CP-140 Aurora citing cost reasons. Immigration O'Leary has proposed creating a "fast track" for citizenship for immigrants who graduate from college or university and find employment, as well as for their spouses and children. O'Leary has advocated for increased border security in order to tackle the issue of irregular border crossing. Senate In a 2017 interview with Evan Solomon, O'Leary suggested that Senators should pay money every year, instead of being paid, thus turning "a cost centre to Canada" into "a profit centre." Leadership debt and lawsuit In November 2018, O'Leary hired lawyer Joseph Groia and sued Elections Canada and Canada's federal elections commissioner over campaign finance laws which limited candidates to spending only $25,000 of their own money for their leadership campaign. At the time of the lawsuit, O'Leary still owed $430,000 to creditors. O'Leary had proposed to Elections Canada that he pay off the debt now with his own money and fundraise the money later, but was rebuffed, since this would be illegal. O'Leary publicly stated that the law promoted mediocrity since rich people would be discouraged from running and hurt the businesses that had pledged money for his failed leadership campaign. In O'Leary's legal submissions, he argued that the laws preventing the use of personal money over $25,000 were a restriction of his Section 2 Charter right to free expression and the threat of jail time in those laws violated his Section 7 Charter right to security of the person. ==Personal life==

O'Leary is Catholic. He and his wife, Linda (née Greer), have been married since 1990. The couple separated in 2011, but they resumed their marriage after two years. They have two children, Trevor and Savannah. In a 2016 interview, O'Leary stated: "In a successful growing business, it eats your time alive. Then later in life, you can provide for your family things that many others can't have. But because you sacrificed, you're then given the reward of freedom." The O'Learys live in Miami Beach and Toronto. He also maintains a cottage in Muskoka, Ontario, as well as homes in Boston and Geneva, Switzerland. In a 2022 CNBC interview, he mentioned that he has obtained a United Arab Emirates citizenship in order to be able to partner with Emiratis on investments. O'Leary is a fan of the New England Patriots football team and claims to watch all of their games, even when he is traveling around the world and games occur during the middle of the night. He is also a lifelong photographer and has exhibited and sold prints of his photographs, donating the proceeds to charity. O'Leary is also an avid watch collector and expert, sharing his insights on both Shark Tank and social media. Boating accident On August 24, 2019, O'Leary and his wife Linda were involved in a fatal crash on Lake Joseph in Muskoka, Ontario, when they were on a boat owned by O'Leary and allegedly operated at the time by Linda. The O'Learys' boat collided with another one and a 64-year-old man and 48-year-old woman on that vessel were killed. O'Leary said in a statement that he was cooperating with the police investigation and that the other boat did not have its lights on and "fled the scene". The police stated that both boats left the scene to "attend a location and both parties called 911." On September 24, Linda O'Leary was charged with "careless operation of a vessel" under the small vessel regulations of the Canada Shipping Act, a charge that carries maximum 18 months imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. The pilot of the other boat, Richard Ruh of Orchard Park, New York, was charged with "failing to exhibit navigation light while underway". On October 11, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada ruled out jail time for Linda. On September 14, 2021, Linda was found not guilty of careless operation of the vessel. ==See also==