The New Age Oracle Of Omaha

OMANI CARSON pulled himself out of poverty by building a service business based on a contradiction: Keep things personal while scaling like crazy. Now the billionaire financial advisor has donned a fur-trimmed poncho and started taking psychedelics while striving to "optimize for joy."

- Sergei Klebnikov

An afternoon birthday party for Omani Carson's 3-year-old granddaughter is raging in his house, nestled along a golf course on a dead-end street in Omaha, Nebraska. Toys and party decorations litter the living room, where the kids are bouncing among games, television and cake. Carson steps away into his quiet downstairs office, walls lined with signed guitars and hunting rifles.

“We're never moving from here,” he says, sitting at a polished wooden table. “My CEO and best friend lives one house over; my kids are moving across the street. They renamed it the cult-de-sac.”

A few miles down the road, some of the 672 staffers at the headquarters of his $55 billion (assets under management) Carson Group are advising clients which stocks to buy and which to avoid, and dispensing wisdom about setting up a durable power of attorney or writing a living will. Others are helping other financial advisors around the country do the same. “They're part of our extended family,” Carson says, “and we treat them that way.”

For four decades, while his first name was still Ron, Carson, 61, built one of the largest registered financial advisor firms in the nation by leaning into personal relationships with his clients. He embraced scores of independent advisors looking for guidance, developing a coaching business to teach them his ways and a support operation to help with things like marketing, tech and infrastructure.

Today, his business has 150 partner offices serving 54,000 affluent families across the nation, up from 33,000 in 2020. Assets have surged more than threefold since 2021, when Carson sold a minority stake to Bain Capital at a $1 billion valuation. Now, thanks to a roughly 51% share of the company and some 16,000 acres of Nebraska farmland, Carson, a former Forbes contributor, is only the second billionaire financial advisor, after Texas-based Ken Fisher (who also used to write for Forbes).