Andy Beal
Andy Beal is the Founder and Chairman of Beal Bank and Beal Bank USA. He is a prominent banker, businessman, and amateur mathematician who amassed his wealth in real estate and banking. He became known for buying properties, renovating them and selling them. He made a great deal during the Great Recession, taking up beaten-down assets while the biggest banks in the United States were being bailed out by taxpayers.
Andy Beal Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Founder and Chairman
Academic History
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BS in Mathematics
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
- Beal grew up in Lansing, Michigan. His mother worked in state government while his father was a mechanical engineer.
- He began earning money as a teenager by fixing and reselling used televisions with the help of his uncle.
- He also installed apartment security systems while in high school, where he excelled on the school debate team.
- He enrolled at Michigan State University and began studying business administration.
- In 1976, he also enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, but left school to focus on his business endeavors.
MATHEMATICS
- Beal is a math whiz who taught himself number theory.
- In 1993, he used his bank’s 15 computers to work up the Beal Conjecture, a generalization of Fermat’s Last Theorem that made him famous.
- He has put up a prize of $1 million for anyone who can prove or disprove the Beal Conjecture.
- Between 2001 and 2004, he took on 16 of the world’s best players in a series of very high-stakes games.
- Beal became a real estate investor at age 19. He bought a house in Lansing for $6,500 and started leasing it out for $119 per month.
- In 1976, he attended an auction of federal properties in Washington, DC and bid on an apartment building in Waco, TX. His winning bid of $217,500 turned into more than $1 million 3 years later when he sold the building.
- In the 1980s, he ran a savings and loan whose purpose was to buy up loan portfolios of troubled banks and other S&L institutions.
- He is known for gobbling up distressed assets, including mortgages, bonds backed by commercial planes and IOUs to power plants.
- In 1981, he and a partner bought two housing project buildings in disrepair in Newark, New Jersey, for $25,000. They were named the Brick Towers. Once repaired, the buildings were sold for $3.2 million to a private investor 2 years later.
- During the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis, he bought up assets that everyone else was dumping—at ridiculously deep discounts—so that while the combined net worth of the four hundred richest people in America dropped by a collective $300 billion, he saw his own net worth triple.
AEROSPACE
- As part of a space privatization trend encouraged by the federal government, Beal started Beal Aerospace in 1997, an aerospace company to build rockets with the goal of placing communications satellites in orbit.
MAJOR BUSINESSES
- Beal Bank
- Beal Bank USA
- CSG Investments
- Loan Acquisition Corporation
- CLG Hedge Fund
PHILANTHROPY