A surfer without a degree is worth $16 billion after his biotech company’s stock soared 1,100% in a year

Bob Duggan is the CEO of Summit Therapeutics.

A surfer without a college degree has gone from baking cookies to building robots, minting billions in biotech, and ranking among the world’s richest people.

Bob Duggan, 80, is the co-CEO and chairman of Summit Therapeutics, a cancer drug developer. He has tripled his net worth to $15.9 billion this year, making him the 23rd biggest wealth gainer of 2024 and the 129th richest person on the planet, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as of Thursday.

His net worth has soared thanks to his more than 550 million shares of Summit, a roughly 75% stake. The company’s stock price has surged by over 1,100% in the past 12 months, lifting its market value to over $16 billion.

Summit stock jumped from about $12 on September 6 to a record high of $32 on September 13, but has retreated to around $23 since then. It spiked after the company released late-stage trial data showing one of its drugs, Ivonescimab, performed better than Merck’s blockbuster Keytruda medication in some lung cancer patients.

Duggan stands out in the biotech industry, where most bosses rely on their advanced degrees to navigate complex, jargon-heavy medical research.

He spent six years taking classes at UC Santa Barbara in the 1960s, but never intended to get a degree as he was focused on finding ways to make money, he recently told The Wall Street Journal. Those included investing in Ethernet companies.

Duggan opened a bakery called Cookie Muncher’s Paradise in 1976 with the help of his then-brother-in-law. They converted it into a luxury sandwich chain, grew it to 16 locations, and then sold it for about $6 million in 1987, according to Bloomberg.

“People laugh that I was in the cookie business. But you know what? It was the bestselling chocolate-chip cookie ever,” he told WSJ. “You know why? Because we engineered it. We engineered it specifically so that it would be soft, so that when you pulled it away, it was like a pizza.”

Duggan went from opening a bakery to making billions in biotech.

Duggan became the CEO and chairman of Computer Motion, a robotic surgery company, in 1990. Intuitive Surgical acquired it for $67 million in stock in 2003, allowing Duggan to cash out his stake for over $150 million eventually.

Spurred on by his son’s death from brain cancer, Duggan started building a stake in Pharmacyclics, a maker of cancer drugs, in 2004. Pharmaceutical titan AbbVie bought the business for $21 billion in cash and stock in 2015, netting Duggan more than $3 billion, per Bloomberg.

He joined Summit’s board in 2019 and became CEO and chairman in 2020, making cancer drugs his principal focus. He appears to have caught lightning twice in the brutal biotech space, where many companies pour tons of money and years of work into medications that turn out to be duds.

Duggan is also a megadonor to the Church of Scientology, and has backed himself to find and bet on more winning businesses as the head of his own venture capital firm, Duggan Investments.