How Shahid built the fortune
Shahid Khan's wealth rests on the car parts industry. In 1980, after several years as an engineer at Flex-N-Gate, a small manufacturer of truck bumpers in Illinois, he bought the company from its owner. He had already started his own business making bumpers using a lighter, one piece design that reduced costs, and combining the two gave him a base for steady expansion.
Through the 1980s and 1990s Flex-N-Gate won supply contracts from American carmakers and then from Japanese manufacturers building factories in the United States. Khan was known for focusing on quality and for winning business from Toyota, whose suppliers face demanding standards. The company grew by adding plants and by acquiring other parts makers, expanding from bumpers into lighting, mechanical assemblies and other components.
Today Flex-N-Gate operates dozens of factories across North America, Europe, South America and Asia and employs a large workforce. Khan is its sole owner, and the company remains privately held, so the profits it generates have accumulated with him and funded his later investments in sport and entertainment.
Khan has said that his approach was to reinvest profits into new plants and technology rather than take them out of the business. Flex-N-Gate became one of the larger privately owned suppliers in the automotive industry, with customers among most of the major global carmakers.
Companies and holdings
Alongside Flex-N-Gate, Khan has built a portfolio of sports and media assets:
- The Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League, bought in 2012
- Fulham Football Club in London, acquired in 2013
- All Elite Wrestling, a professional wrestling promotion launched in 2019 with his son Tony Khan, who runs it
- Ring of Honor, a wrestling promotion acquired by Tony Khan in 2022
- Real estate development around the Jaguars' stadium in downtown Jacksonville
He was also an investor in the Black News Channel, a cable network that ceased operations in 2022. In 2018 he made an offer to buy Wembley Stadium from the English Football Association, which he withdrew after opposition. Khan has also been involved in plans to renovate the Jaguars' stadium in partnership with the city of Jacksonville.
Under his ownership the Jaguars have also played regular games in London at Wembley Stadium, building a following in Britain that links his two main football interests.
Early life and career
Khan was born in 1950 in Lahore, Pakistan, into a middle class family; his father worked in construction and his mother was a mathematics teacher. He arrived in the United States in 1967, at sixteen, to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has often recalled that his first job was washing dishes for a small hourly wage and that his first night was spent in a room at the campus YMCA.
He graduated in 1971 with a degree in industrial engineering and went to work at Flex-N-Gate while still close to the university. His experience there exposed him to the manufacturing problems of the bumper business, and he spent his spare time developing an improved design. In 1978 he founded Bumper Works, a company built around that design, and two years later he bought his former employer and merged the businesses. Khan became an American citizen in 1991.
Khan has said that his early years in Illinois, working through university on modest jobs and learning the manufacturing trade from the factory floor, shaped his belief in hard work and in the opportunities available to immigrants in the United States.
Philanthropy and public life
Khan has given to the University of Illinois, including support for its engineering programmes and athletic facilities, and has funded community programmes in Jacksonville through the Jaguars Foundation and related efforts focused on youth, health and military families. He has also supported projects in Champaign and Urbana, where Flex-N-Gate has its headquarters.
As one of the most visible immigrant business owners in the United States, and the first member of an ethnic minority to own an NFL team, he is frequently invited to speak about entrepreneurship and immigration. He generally avoids partisan politics in public and focuses his remarks on business, sport and opportunity.