Two Billionaire Heiresses Are Tearing Through the US Open

The US Open will pay its women’s winner a record $3.6 million Saturday. For two of the quarterfinalists, that would be chump change.

Americans Jessica Pegula, ranked sixth in the world, and Emma Navarro, ranked 13th, are on a collision course for the final. They also happen to be the daughters of billionaires. 

(Update: Both Pegula and Navarro won their quarterfinal matches, setting up a potential all-heiress final. Navarro faces world No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka in the first semifinal Thursday night in Queens, while Pegula will be favored against the unseeded Karolína Muchová in the second semifinal Thursday.)

Pegula is the daughter of Terry Pegula, who owns both professional sports teams in Buffalo, the Sabres and the Bills. In a recent press conference, she pushed back on the idea that she lives a cosseted lifestyle. 

“People think I have a butler, that I get chauffeured around,” she said. “I have a private limo, that I fly private everywhere. … I’m definitely not like that. People can think what they want. I don’t know. I just think it’s kind of funny. A butler? I read these comments. … I’m like, no, not at all.”

Navarro’s father, Ben, is a former vice president at the megabank Citigroup. Both players are New York natives; their families made their enormous fortunes very differently. 

Terry Pegula, who is worth nearly $8 billion, according to Forbes, made his money in fracking. In the early 1980s, Pegula founded East Resources, his own natural gas drilling company. In 2010, he became a billionaire when he sold most of the company to Royal Dutch Shell for $4.7 billion and the rest to American Energy Partners four years later for $1.75 billion. 

Shell’s purchase of Pegula’s company gave it more access to shale gas reserves in the United States, while boosting its daily production in the company by 7.5%. Pegula’s second deal, which came while he was bidding for the Bills, gave AEP the drilling rights to roughly 75,000 acres of land in Ohio and West Virginia. Pegula still has oil and gas assets throughout the country. 

Pegula’s sales match up with his professional sports purchases. Shortly after selling to RDS, he bought the Buffalo Sabres in 2011 for $189 million. He bought the Bills in 2014 for $1.4 billion, the same year he sold the rest of East Resources to AEP. Pegula famously outbid rock star Jon Bon Jovi and future President Donald Trump to buy the Bills. 

Since then, Pegula has also developed waterfront properties in Buffalo. Ironically, despite her father being a prominent booster at Penn State, his alma mater, Jessica played tennis at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Ben Navarro, meanwhile, started his career at Chemical Bank and Goldman Sachs, where he made loans to banks and worked in mortgage-backed securities. In the late 1980s, he joined Citigroup, where he rose to the rank of vice president. He left Citi in 1997 and founded his own company, Sherman Financial Group, the following year. The company went on to become one of the largest buyers of consumer debt in the country. The company now operates Credit One Bank, which targets subprime borrowers for credit cards. 

Navarro is considered a pioneer for turning credit-card debt collecting into a multibillion dollar industry. In 2020, when COVID-19 shut down the world and slowed the economy, most debt collectors gave their borrowers a break and avoided taking them to court. Sherman Financial did the opposite. The firm had the largest year-over-year increase in lawsuits of 52% compared to its peers between mid-March when the country shut down, through the rest of the calendar year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. While Pegula is richer, Navarro is still worth roughly $1.5 billion. 

The two billionaires nearly became peers in 2018, when Navarro unsuccessfully made a bid to buy the Carolina Panthers. Hedge fund manager David Tepper won out, buying the team for $2.2 billion. Most of Navarro’s sports investments are in his daughter’s sport, tennis. His company, Beemok Sports, owns several tournaments, including the Charleston Open, where he lives, and the Cincinnati Open, best known as a final warm-up for the US Open.

Both billionaire scions have already made the deepest major runs of their careers. Pegula had previously made the quarterfinals at majors four times, while Navarro’s quarterfinal appearance at the French Open earlier this year was her previous best showing in a major.