Ernest Garcia III.

Ernest (Ernie) Garcia III is the Co-Founder and CEO of Carvana, the online used car retailer famous for its multi-story car vending machines and e-commerce approach to auto sales.

Garcia co-founded Carvana in 2012 and took the company public in 2017. At its peak, Carvana was valued at over $60 billion-briefly making Garcia one of the wealthiest people in America. The company pioneered an entirely new model for selling used cars: customers could browse inventory online, finance their purchase, and have a car delivered to their door or picked up from one of Carvana's iconic vending machines. Carvana experienced a dramatic rise and fall, with its stock plummeting during the inflation-driven auto market downturn of 2022, then spectacularly recovering in 2023-2024 as the company restructured and returned to growth. Garcia's ability to navigate one of the most extreme boom-bust cycles in modern American retail-and bring Carvana back from the brink-demonstrates remarkable entrepreneurial resilience. The company has fundamentally changed consumer expectations for how used cars are purchased in America, forcing traditional dealerships to adopt digital capabilities.