Sure, there were lots of models at the Met Gala . And yeah, there were even a few billionaires too. But there was only one man who, in addition to being both model and a billionaire, has also spent years of his life working on a salmon farm: Gustav Magnar Witzøe.
The 31-year-old Norwegian set social media alight with his standout sartorial display in a nude-hued, iridescent Versace outfit. What’s especially wild about Witzøe stealing the show on the biggest night in fashion, though, is that for him, being a globe-trotting model is something roughly akin to an astonishingly swanky side gig. That’s because his wealth comes from SalMar, the salmon farming giant his father started in the early ‘90s which is now among the largest salmon producers on the planet.
As a result of the chunk of the business that Witzøe’s father gifted him, his personal fortune now stands at around $4 billion, according to Forbes . Gustav Magnar Witzoe arrives for the 2024 Met Gala on May 6, 2024, in New York. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images Yet despite being considered among the youngest billionaires in the world, he was perhaps one of the lesser well-known faces at the Met Gala.
It was that relative anonymity which partly fueled the clamor to find out about the man who’d made such a splash. “It was pretty funny when all the articles were like ‘the random Norwegian guy,’ ‘the salmon king,’ the day after,” Witzøe tells The Daily Beast from Frøya, the tiny island where he grew.