Don Hankey

Don Robert Hankey (born June 13, 1943, in Los Angeles) is an American billionaire who built one of the largest privately held financial empires in Southern California. The son of a Los Angeles car dealer, he studied finance at the University of Southern California (graduating in the mid-1960s). In 1972 he returned to run the family's struggling Midway Ford dealership in Koreatown, where he introduced a profit-sharing fund reported to generate roughly 25% annual returns — an early signal of the numbers-first discipline that would define his career.

Recognizing that car buyers with weak or no credit were underserved, Hankey founded Westlake Financial Services in 1978 as the core of what became The Hankey Group. Westlake grew into one of the largest indirect auto lenders in the U.S., working with more than 50,000 dealerships across all 50 states and earning Hankey the nickname "the king of the subprime car loan." In 1996 he incorporated Nowcom, the group's technology arm, whose DealerCenter platform provides dealer-management and multi-lender software; in 2021 Westlake's operations were organized under the Nowlake structure (reported at ~$17B in assets under management). More recently the group has pushed into AI, with a machine-learning underwriting tool (Visorbot) said to process hundreds of thousands of applications daily.

Today Hankey is chairman and primary stockholder of all Hankey Group entities, which span auto lending, Knight Insurance Group / Knight Specialty Insurance, real estate (Hankey Investment Company owns over a million square feet of commercial property in Southern California), a Toyota dealership, rental car and dealer-software businesses. He is also the largest individual shareholder of Axos Financial, the bank that refinanced Donald Trump's Trump Tower mortgage ($100M) in 2022. As of 2024 his net worth was reported at roughly $7.4B (higher on some regional lists), consistently ranking him among the wealthiest people in Los Angeles.

Hankey drew national attention in April 2024 when Knight Specialty Insurance — which he chairs — underwrote and posted the $175 million bond that let Trump appeal his New York civil-fraud judgment, a deal Hankey said was ultimately backed entirely by cash. He is married with four children.

• Invests as a principal off his own balance sheet, not as a fund manager — he takes controlling stakes in operating companies or lends directly, rather than writing small early-stage startup checks.
• Data- and metrics-driven underwriting: his stated philosophy is incremental improvement by watching the numbers — *"You keep the information every month on what you do, see how you're trending, and try to improve on your numbers."*
• Prove-it-then-scale approach to new bets: *"If it works well and we gain market share, then we'll get more involved."*
• Focuses on credit-challenged / underserved niches (subprime auto, specialty insurance) where higher-yield risk can be priced with proprietary analytics and technology.
• Strong appetite for asset-backed and real-estate bridge lending through Hankey Capital, and for large anchor stakes in regulated financial institutions (e.g., Axos Financial).
• Increasingly building and buying automation/AI underwriting technology to widen his lending edge.