Rick Cohen and his family are ranked No. 97 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $26.3 billion. He is the owner of the grocery wholesaler C&S and the majority owner and chief executive of the robotics firm Symbotic.
Richard B. “Rick” Cohen was born in 1952 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Norma and Lester Cohen. He graduated from Deerfield Academy in 1970 and from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 with a degree in economics, concentrating in accounting.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 97, with $26.3 billion, listed as “Rick Cohen & family”
- Other estimates: trackers differ widely; search-based summaries put his family at between about $21.8 billion and $28.2 billion in 2026
C&S Wholesale Grocers
In 1974 Cohen began work at the family firm, C&S Wholesalers in Worcester, which his grandfather Israel Cohen had co-founded in 1918. After a three-week union strike nearly closed the business, he persuaded his father to move it to Brattleboro, Vermont. He took control in 1989 when his father retired, and in 2003 moved the company’s headquarters to Keene, New Hampshire. Because food distribution is a low-margin business, C&S works with performance incentives and self-managed teams; fewer than 2% of the orders it processes have errors or omissions. C&S is the largest US grocery wholesaler, with about $34 billion in annual revenue, according to Forbes.
Symbotic
- Founder: Cohen founded Symbotic, a robotics warehouse automation company based in Wilmington, Massachusetts
- Customers: as of 2021 its AI-enabled platform was used by C&S, Walmart, Target, Albertsons and other large retailers; Forbes says most of the family’s wealth now comes from it, thanks to its partnership with Walmart
- December 2021: it announced plans to go public through a merger with a SPAC sponsored by SoftBank
Philanthropy and Family
In 2001 the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College was renamed after the Cohens in thanks for their financial support. Cohen is married to Jan Cohen, executive producer of the Kaddish Project, a musical oratorio on genocide, and they have three children.
Why It Matters
Symbotic’s deal to automate Walmart’s regional distribution centres made Cohen one of America’s newest technology billionaires, rooted in a century-old grocery business. His wealth is highly sensitive to Symbotic’s share price.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Downtown Keene, New Hampshire, where C&S Wholesale Grocers is headquartered (file photo, 2013; Rick Cohen is not pictured). Photo: Jon Platek / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
