Shark Tank's Mr. Wonderful Only Makes Money Off Companies Led by Women

Kevin O’Leary, unofficial star of the capitalist-utopian propaganda TV show Shark Tank, is known for dropping vicious entrepreneurial truth bombs of the highest caliber: “You’re dead to me,” he spits, at the slightest hint of future inconvenience. “Don’t cry about money, it never cries about you.” Recently, the metaphor-generating Canadian (nicknamed “Mr. Wonderful”) spoke to Business Insider about another truth he’s accumulated in his years of chasing millions: only the women-led companies are profitable.

“All the cash in the last two quarters is coming from companies run by women,” he told Business Insider at a recent event for the startup Honeyfund, in which he is an investor. “I don’t have a single company run by a man right now that’s outperformed the ones run by women.”

He has 27 companies in his portfolio, 55 percent of which have female CEOs. None of the other 45 percent are profitable, according to Kevin.

O’Leary discovered this by accident. He asked his staff to see what all of the companies providing returns to his portfolios had in common, and it found that the companies returning on O’Leary’s investments were all led by women.

“What’s interesting is that these are companies across multiple sectors,” he told Business Insider. “One is a company in the food business. Another is in consumer goods. Another is a manufacturing company. One is a biotech company. They have nothing to do with each other, and yet, they’re still getting better returns.”

Hell yeah, Mr. Wonderful. He says his portfolio has been divided evenly across genders “for about six years,” but not deliberately or anything, okay?

“I just looked at deals,” he said. “I never looked at gender. I have no bias. I want to make money. I’m trying to find the path of least resistance with the best people I can find. I’m agnostic to where they came from.”

Good, good; cool, cool. Equality predicated on instinct rather than an explicit agenda is always very chill in my eyes—a recent Silicon Valley scene where Gabe from The Office tries to hire a superstar (female) coder in the most awkward way possible is a great example of the opposite—but hey, maybe Mr. Wonderful should develop a little bit of gender bias? Against men, I mean. Just for the sake of making more mo-ney.