Medical supplies giant Medline went public on Wednesday in one of the largest initial public offerings of 2025, and saw its stock soar 41%, closing its first day of trading with a market capitalization of more than $55 billion. The listing, along with some newly discovered ownership records about the Medline founding family’s private company, propelled at least five members of the Illinois-based Mills family to make Forbes’ billionaires list for the first time.
The five new billionaires are children of Medline co-founders, brothers Jim and Jon Mills. Jim’s son, Charlie Mills, 64, who was CEO of Medline for 26 years until 2023, is worth an estimated $10.9 billion. Jon’s son, Andy Mills, also 64, who was president during that same period, has an estimated fortune of $5.4 billion. Jon’s daughter, Wendy Abrams, 61, who has no position in the company, is worth an estimated $4.5 billion. (Her husband, Jim Abrams, 63, was Medline’s chief operating officer, also from 1997 to 2023.) Charlie and Andy Mills remain directors of Medline, and Charlie remains chairman of the publicly traded company, which is now led by an outside CEO, Jim Boyle. The other two billionaires are Andy’s sister, Nancy Mills Barnett, 62, and Charlie’s sister, Margaret “Peggy” Baker, 60, whose fortune is estimated at $4.2 billion and $3.8 billion, respectively. Barnett’s husband, Joel Barnett, runs a boutique real estate investment firm called Barnett Capital and previously worked as a Medline real estate advisor. It is unclear if Baker or any of his immediate family members have ever worked for the company. Jim Mills, co-founder of Medline, passed away in 2019, and his brother Jon Mills appears to be enjoying a peaceful retirement. A spokesperson for the Mills family, whose combined net worth is estimated at $31 billion, declined to comment for this story.
Founded in 1966, Medline has remained 100% in family hands for nearly 55 years. Then, in 2021, the next generation of the Mills family sold 79% of the company to a group of private equity firms led by Blackstone and Carlyle in a leveraged buyout that valued Medline at more than $30 billion. Forbes estimates the Mills family made $18 billion after taxes from this deal, leaving the clan with a 21% stake ahead of Wednesday’s IPO. They sold no shares in the offering, but their combined ownership was diluted to about a 17% stake. Since the private equity firms took control, Medline’s revenue has grown nearly 50%, rising from $17.5 billion in 2020 to $25.5 billion in 2024. The company reported net income of $1.2 billion in 2024, and is expected to surpass that figure in 2025. In the first nine months of the year, Medline made a net profit of $1 billion with sales of 20.6 billion dollars.
Although the majority of the Mills’ wealth was generated as a result of the Medline leveraged buyout in 2021, the distribution of the Mills family fortune was unknown until now. This changed with the filing of Medline’s IPO prospectus, which revealed that the Mills family’s remaining stake in the company is held by an entity called Mozart Holdco. Forbes found the latest filing for this entity in the Alaska Corporation Database, revealing that 91% of Mozart Holdco is held in trusts in the names of the five family members Forbes estimates are billionaires. According to Forbes analysis, trusts in the names of Charlie, Andy, Nancy, Wendy and Peggy own 37%, 18%, 14%, 12% and 11% of Mozart Holdco, respectively.
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The Mills family has shown no signs of selling more shares. In fact, according to Medline’s IPO prospectus, the clan expressed interest in purchasing up to $250 million of additional shares at a price of $29 per share in Wednesday’s public offering. The company’s stock closed at $41 per share on its first day of trading.
Medline traces its origins to 1910, when AL Mills—the great-grandfather of Charlie and Andy Mills—left his small town in Arkansas to move to Chicago, where he began selling handmade aprons to workers in the city’s meatpacking district. After a nun at a local hospital asked if he could make hospital garments, AL Mills expanded his business to include surgeon’s gowns.
“At the time, a butcher’s apron and a surgeon’s gown were the same material, except one had sleeves and the other didn’t,” Andy Mills told Forbes in 2020. “He decided it was much nicer to go see nuns and hospitals than men slaughtering animals in the packinghouse district.”
In 1912, AL Mills founded Mills Hospital Supplies, and 12 years later passed the business on to his son Irving Mills. Under Irving’s leadership, the family pioneered the use of blue and green fabrics that reduced glare from lights in operating rooms, and was also the first to introduce pink and blue striped blankets for newborns.
Irving Mills expanded the business to medical equipment, surgical instruments and gloves, eventually selling Mills Hospital Supplies to Chicago-based laboratory equipment firm Cenco Instruments in 1961. Five years later, Irving’s sons, Jon and Jim Mills, re-entered the medical supplies business and founded Medline with a $500,000 ($5 million today) investment from their father.
By the end of their first year, the brothers had achieved $1 million in revenue ($10 million today) selling robes, sheets, and towels. They briefly took Medline public in 1972, but bought the company back and took it private again five years later. When Charlie and Andy Mills and Jim Abrams took over leadership of Medline in 1997, sales had grown to more than $500 million ($1 billion today).
Medline rose to national prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the company’s products—ranging from specialized items such as medical masks and biomaterial bags to more common items such as hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes—experienced a surge in demand from doctors and hospitals battling the new virus. The company increased production of its most sought-after products, and sales increased 26%, from $13.9 billion in 2019 to $17.5 billion in 2020.
Despite being one of the richest families in the United States, the Mills family is famous for its privacy, although it has occasionally made headlines for its philanthropy. Andy Mills committed $200 million to a new nonprofit called the Vivo Foundation, right around the time of the 2021 sale. Wendy and Jim Abrams, for their part, contributed $550 million to their own foundation, the 1111 Foundation, in that same year.
“For a long time, I thought it was good that Medline was under the radar,” Jim Abrams told Forbes in 2020. “There is a level of modesty in the company that we don’t walk around with an attitude of arrogance.”
This article was originally published on Forbes US
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