Ernest C. Garcia III

Ernest C. Garcia III, known as Ernie Garcia III, is the founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of Carvana, an e-commerce company that buys, reconditions, finances, and sells used cars through its own operations rather than a dealership network. Carvana is best known for its multi-story automated car vending machines, but its core is a vertically integrated system that handles a used-car transaction end to end. The company went public in 2017, came close to collapse in 2022, and posted record profitability in 2025.¹

Background

Garcia was born around 1982 in Tempe, Arizona, part of the Phoenix metro area. His father, Ernest Garcia II, was convicted of bank fraud in 1990 in connection with the Lincoln Savings and Loan and Charles Keating scandal and went bankrupt, then bought the failing rental-car franchise Ugly Duckling for under $1 million and built it into DriveTime, the fourth-largest used-car retailer in the United States, with 149 locations across 29 states.¹ The family's wealth and its knowledge of the used-car industry trace directly to that recovery. Garcia worked every summer at DriveTime starting at age 15, and earned a bachelor of science in management science and engineering from Stanford University in 2005.

Getting started

After Stanford, Garcia spent 2005 to 2006 as an associate in the Principal Transactions Group at RBS Greenwich Capital, working on structured consumer-credit products. From 2007 to 2013 he worked at DriveTime in finance roles, ending as director of quantitative analytics, building the credit-scoring models used to price subprime auto loans.¹ Garcia has credited this work with giving him full visibility into where a car transaction made and lost money. In 2011 his first venture, a card-linked offers startup called Looterang, failed; he said "we didn't know enough about the industry to make it work."²

Garcia has described the founding insight as coming from watching wholesale used-car auctions, where professional dealers completed purchases in about 30 seconds, against the four-plus hours of friction in retail car buying. The founding question, as he framed it, was whether a company could get customers closer to that experience.² He founded Carvana on November 28, 2012, in the Phoenix and Tempe area with Ben Huston and Ryan Keeton. It was incubated inside DriveTime, seeded with roughly $100 million from his father, and launched using DriveTime's existing inventory and financing infrastructure.¹ Garcia has said venture investors on Sand Hill Road broadly declined to fund the company, pushing it toward family and DriveTime capital instead.²

What he built

Carvana made its first retail sale in Atlanta in 2013 and opened its first automated car vending machine in Nashville in 2015. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CVNA in April 2017, raising about $225 million; Garcia became chairman after the IPO while remaining chief executive. It acquired Car360 in 2018 for $22 million for 360-degree photography technology, and the ADESA U.S. physical auction business in 2022 for $2.2 billion for reconditioning and logistics capacity. In 2020 it reported $5.587 billion in revenue on 244,111 vehicles sold, and in 2021 it became one of the youngest companies added to the Fortune 500.¹

In 2022 Carvana nearly collapsed. Its stock fell about 90 percent from its 52-week high amid oversupply, rising interest rates, and debt concerns. The company cut about 12 percent of its workforce, roughly 2,500 employees, in May 2022, and its stock dropped about 40 percent in a single day that November on weak third-quarter results. Carvana restructured its debt with bondholders in 2023, cut more than 4,000 additional jobs in February 2024, eliminated roughly $1.1 billion in annualized expenses, and rolled out proprietary operations software and generative-AI tooling. In 2025 it reported $20.3 billion in revenue, $1.41 billion in net income, and $13.2 billion in total assets, and expanded into new cars.¹

How he operates

Garcia believes a company cannot deliver the experience he wants without owning the whole transaction. He has said, "We don't believe you can give customers the experience we want unless you do it all," and Carvana owns inventory sourcing, reconditioning, patented 360-degree photography, financing, and last-mile delivery rather than outsourcing the physical layer, the default assumption in 2012.² He credits his years building DriveTime's credit models as the reason he could see and restructure the entire transaction rather than only the software layer. Garcia treats his father's fraud, bankruptcy, and comeback as an operating template rather than a stigma, and that narrative appears to inform his risk tolerance. He built the business around the financing and transaction mechanics that incumbents could not see, and the return on that read is collected after the purchase, in reconditioning, logistics, and delivery, rather than in how any deal was structured.

Where things stand

As of 2026 Garcia remains Carvana's founder, chief executive, and chairman, and the company has executed one of the sharpest financial reversals in recent corporate history, from bankruptcy fears in 2022 to record profits in 2025. In January 2025 Hindenburg Research published a short report alleging accounting manipulation and questioning the turnaround, citing related-party loan-sale transactions with DriveTime; a related securities class-action fraud suit is proceeding in the U.S. District Court in Arizona, where motions to dismiss were denied in February 2025.¹ The allegations are contested and unresolved. Forbes estimated Garcia's net worth at about $10.4 billion as of July 2026; Bloomberg reported his wealth fell about 98 percent during the 2022 crash before rebounding.²

Key facts

• His father, Ernest Garcia II, was convicted of bank fraud in the 1990 Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, went bankrupt, then built DriveTime from a sub-$1 million distressed acquisition, the source of Carvana's seed capital.
• Garcia has said venture investors on Sand Hill Road broadly passed on Carvana, which was seeded instead with roughly $100 million of family capital.
• He has traced Carvana's founding question to wholesale auto auctions, where dealers closed deals in about 30 seconds versus four-plus hours for retail consumers.
• Carvana's stock fell about 90 percent in 2022 amid bankruptcy fears; the company reported $1.41 billion in net income in 2025.
• In 2018 Garcia distributed about $35 million of his personal Carvana stock to employees to mark the company's 100,000th vehicle sold.
• A January 2025 Hindenburg Research short report alleged accounting manipulation tied to related-party DriveTime transactions; the litigation is unresolved.