Marc Lore

Amazon cut diaper prices by 30 percent and announced an Amazon Mom promotion in the middle of talks to buy Marc Lore's company. Lore sold Diapers.com anyway, for 545 million dollars, and said afterward that the team had not wanted to sell but sold out.¹ Lore is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Wonder Group, the parent company of Wonder, a meal-delivery and food-hall platform that builds physical multi-restaurant locations paired with a delivery app and describes its ambition as becoming the Amazon of food delivery. Wonder also owns Grubhub, which Lore acquired in November 2024. He is best known as a serial ecommerce founder whose first two companies were both bought by the two largest retailers in the United States.

Background

Lore was born on May 16, 1971, in Staten Island, New York. His early childhood was marked by household conflict and drug use, and he found stability with his maternal grandparents. Around age 10 his family relocated to Lincroft, New Jersey, a more stable suburb, where his father ran a computer-consulting firm called Chadmarc Systems. As a child he was nicknamed the human calculator and was reading books on stock options by seventh grade. He became a New Jersey state champion in the 55-meter dash in 1989, ran a high-school baseball-card business called The Mint, and reportedly counted cards at blackjack in Atlantic City with his future business partner Vinit Bharara. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1993 with a degree in business management and economics, cum laude, the first college graduate in his family. In 1996 he won a spot in a U.S. National Bobsled Team tryout but stayed at his banking job, missing the 1998 Nagano Olympics.¹

Getting started

Lore began his career in Wall Street risk management at Bankers Trust starting in 1993, then as a vice president for emerging-markets risk at Credit Suisse First Boston, and as head of risk management at Sanwa International Bank in London. At age 25 he co-founded the Global Association of Risk Professionals, or GARP, with Lev Borodovsky. It began as a weekly pub meetup and today claims more than 150,000 members across roughly 195 countries. He also co-authored The Professional's Handbook of Financial Risk Management. In 1999 he co-founded The Pit, an eBay-style real-time marketplace for sports-card trading, which he sold to Topps for 5.7 million dollars.¹ He enrolled in Wharton's executive MBA program in 2003 and dropped out to found Diapers.com.

What he built

Lore started Diapers.com in 2005, originally as 1800Diapers, with Bharara and first employee Scott Hilton. The founding insight, borrowed from big-box retail, was to sell diapers as a loss-leader to acquire a relationship with new parents and then cross-sell everything else. Early on he bought out the diaper stock at BJ's Wholesale using credit cards to fill orders. The Amazon price war ran through 2009 and 2010, and Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, sold in November 2010.

He founded Jet.com, which launched on July 21, 2015. Its insight was that no one was serving price-sensitive shoppers as opposed to speed-focused customers on Amazon Prime and Walmart, and a real-time pricing algorithm dropped prices as customers added items, passing logistics savings back instantly. Jet raised 80 million dollars before launch from investors including Accel, NEA, and Bain Capital Ventures, built a waitlist of more than 250,000 people, and reached one billion dollars in gross merchandise value in year one.¹ In August 2016 Walmart acquired Jet.com for 3.3 billion dollars, the largest ecommerce acquisition at the time, and Lore became president and chief executive of Walmart U.S. eCommerce from 2016 to 2021.¹

Lore left Walmart in 2021 to found Wonder and has personally invested more than 300 million dollars of his own money into it. Wonder was valued at roughly 3.5 billion dollars in a 2022 raise.² It was valued at around 7 billion dollars in a May 2025 raise of 600 million dollars, with reporting later in 2025 pointing to a higher target tied to a possible IPO. He also backs Telosa, a proposed 150,000-acre planned city in the American desert unveiled in 2021 and designed with Bjarke Ingels Group, and is a minority co-owner of the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves and the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx with Alex Rodriguez.

How he operates

Across his ventures, Lore repeats a recognizable pattern: he identifies an underserved price or service segment left open by a dominant incumbent, builds a customer-acquisition or pricing mechanism that looks unprofitable in the short term but compounds lifetime value, then either gets bought by the incumbent or tries to become one. He is comfortable raising and burning large amounts of outside and personal capital to outlast incumbent retaliation, a lesson he draws from Amazon's diaper price war. Lore believes that people often underestimate the risk of the status quo and overestimate the risk of change, and he frames founding decisions around whether someone is willing to work 100 hours a week for something with a low probability of success.¹

Where things stand

Lore is running Wonder as chairman and chief executive, expanding its food-hall locations and integrating Grubhub delivery, and pursuing a possible IPO path per 2025 reporting. Telosa remains in the design and site-selection phase with no confirmed groundbreaking as of 2025. He remains a minority owner of the Timberwolves and Lynx. Fortune estimated his net worth at roughly 2.8 billion dollars in 2025.

Key facts

• Both of his first two companies, Diapers.com and Jet.com, ended up owned by the two largest retailers in America, Amazon and Walmart respectively.
• He qualified for a U.S. National Bobsled Team tryout in 1996 but stayed at his risk-management job, missing the 1998 Nagano Olympics.
• Amazon was calculated to be on pace to lose more than 100 million dollars in three months in the diaper category alone while fighting to keep Diapers.com from Walmart.
• He has put more than 300 million dollars of his own money into Wonder while also backing Telosa, a from-scratch city designed by Bjarke Ingels Group.
• Wonder's valuation moved from roughly 3.5 billion dollars in 2022 to around 7 billion dollars in May 2025, with a higher target reported later in 2025.
• He co-founded GARP, a global risk-management association, at age 25; it now claims more than 150,000 members in roughly 195 countries.