“I Need to Protect My Tribe”: Toto Wolff Once Shared How His Father’s Death Made Him ‘Protective’ of Mercedes Team

Earlier last year, Harvard Business School announced hiring Toto Wolff as a guest lecturer for their MBA program. However, the Mercedes team boss learned one of the greatest lessons in management through a personal tragedy. Wolff was just eight when he lost his father and had to look after himself and his sister. The protective trait he developed in those trying times stays with him to this day and is helping him support his staff at the Mercedes F1 team.

In a video from earlier last year, The Race quoted him as saying, “It is my responsibility to look after everybody in this organization and my family. That’s maybe also because I had to take responsibility at a very early age for my sister and I. What it triggers in me is an instinct of ‘This is my tribe, and I need to protect my tribe, no matter what.”

Wolff’s father was diagnosed with brain cancer when he was just eight. Since the Austrian was unable to pay the fees, he once had to leave the school in the middle of the day.

While the financial struggles were painful, his parents decided to separate while his father was still ill. The entire episode took a toll on young Wolff.

He has, however, come a long way from those times. From facing abject poverty to crossing a $1 billion valuation, Wolff has seen life come full circle.

How Toto Wolff made a fortune worth $1 billion?

Watching his friend race on Nurburgring, Toto Wolff found inspiration to become a racer himself. Taking up motor racing at 17, he joined a racing school.

The passion took a backseat when a sponsor backed out and he had to join college to learn economics. A little while later, Wolff forego racing to join a bank as an intern and thereafter worked with a steel company’s sales management team.

Determined to make it big in life, Wolff started an investment company in partnership. As this business picked up, he opened up branches worldwide. Following his success in business, he once again turned to his teenage passion for motor racing.

While following this passion, he started investing in motorsport companies, one of which included an F3 team’s engine supplier. A horrific accident in 2009 made him quit racing but by that time, the Austrian had acquired a 16% stake in the Williams F1 team.

Wolff joined Williams’ board of directors then and in 2012 he was appointed as the Executive Director. His racing career may have been short-lived, but his business brain helped him reunite with motorsport.

As the journey in F1 continued, he soon acquired a 30% share in Mercedes and joined as team principal. Since then, he has led the Silver Arrows to eight world championships and made a personal fortune worth more than $1 billion.

Currently, Wolff is the richest team principal in F1. What’s more astonishing is that he is richer than every F1 driver as well, and that includes Lewis Hamilton.