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Alice Louise Walton is an American heiress to the fortune of Walmart.

In September 2016, she owned over US$11 billion in Walmart shares. As of October 2022, Walton has a net worth of $59 billion, making her the 19th-richest person, and the second-richest woman in the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Early in her career, Walton was an equity analyst and money manager for First Commerce Corporation and headed investment activities at Arvest Bank Group.[7] She was also a broker for EF Hutton. In 1988, Walton founded Llama Company, an investment bank, where she was president, chairwoman, and CEO.

Walton was the first person to chair the Northwest Arkansas Council and played a significant role in the development of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, which opened in 1998. At the time, the business and civic leaders of Northwest Arkansas Council found a need for the $109 million regional airport in their corner of the state. Walton provided $15 million in initial funding for construction.  Her company, Llama Company, underwrote a $79.5 million bond. The Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Authority recognized Walton’s contributions to the creation of the airport and named the terminal the Alice L. Walton Terminal Building. She was inducted into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame in 2001.

In the late 1990s, Llama Co. closed, and in 1998, Walton moved to a ranch in Millsap, Texas, named Walton’s Rocking W Ranch. An avid horse-lover, she was known for having an eye for determining which 2-month-olds would grow to be champion cutters. Walton listed the farm for sale in 2015 and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, citing the need to focus on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Bentonville, Arkansas, art museum she founded that opened in 2011. In his 1992 autobiography Made in America, Sam Walton remarked that Alice was “the most like me—a maverick—but even more volatile than I am.”

Walton and her mother would often paint watercolors on camping trips. Her interest in art led to the Walton Family Foundation developing the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. In December 2004, Walton purchased art sold from the collection of Daniel Fraad and Rita Fraad at Sotheby’s, in New York. In 2005, Walton purchased Asher Brown Durand‘s celebrated painting, Kindred Spirits, in a sealed-bid auction for a purported US$35 million.

 The 1849 painting, a tribute to Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, had been given to the New York Public Library in 1904 by Julia Bryant, the daughter of Romantic poet and New York newspaper publisher William Cullen Bryant, who is depicted in the painting with Cole. She has also purchased works by American painters Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper and a notable portrait of George Washington by Charles Willson Peale, in preparation for the opening of Crystal Bridges.

In 2009, Walton acquired Norman Rockwell‘s “Rosie the Riveter” for $4.9 million.