Bufetico
Sam Walton’s grandchildren were given a say over close to half the votes at Walmart.
Most of the family’s Walmart stock sits in two places, a holding company called Walton Enterprises and a family trust, and the holding company votes the shares in both. At the end of 2024, Rob, Jim and Alice, Sam’s children, moved their control of the holding company into a set of family trusts, and eight grandchildren became trustees next to them. CNBC reported it last December as a slow handover to the next generation.
None of them works for Walmart directly, though one sits on the board and an in-law chairs it. They have their own projects. One of them, Lukas, invests in things like fuel made from sewage and bonds that pay for ocean conservation, and his cousins Tom and Steuart backed a mountain biking park near Bentonville.
And their stake is why the most official-looking number about Walmart’s size leaves them out. On the cover of Walmart’s last annual report there’s a figure that looks like what the company is worth, filed with the SEC and precise to the dollar: $391,703,475,732.
It’s about half.
What market cap measures
Market cap, short for market capitalization, is the price of one share times every share there is.
Walmart had 7,972,851,122 shares outstanding in late August 2025. In July 2025 it was buying its own stock back, and it has to report what it paid: $96.60 a share on average that month. Multiply and you get roughly $770 billion.
The cover says $391.7 billion, so $378 billion of Walmart is missing from it. Most of what’s missing belongs to the Waltons.
Who the cover leaves out
Right after the number, the cover says what it measures: the value of the shares held by everyone except the company’s affiliates, which for Walmart means its directors, its executive officers and anyone who owns 5 percent or more.
The SEC sorts companies into size groups with this number, and each company measures it on the last business day of the second quarter of its fiscal year. That’s why Walmart’s is dated July 31. For that job it’s the right number, and it puts Walmart in the biggest group.
The proxy, the report Walmart sends shareholders before its annual meeting, lists who crosses the 5 percent line. In the one that was current when the cover number was measured, from April 2025, Walton Enterprises has 44.80 percent of Walmart. That 44.80 percent includes the trust’s shares, because the holding company votes them. The Vanguard Group, the fund company, is on the list too, at 5.16 percent. Between them that’s about half of Walmart, and none of it counts toward the number on the cover.
It catches you if you go straight to the 10-K for the number. In the SEC’s own data it’s worse: the same figure shows up without the sentence that explains it, labeled public float, the value of the shares in outside hands. Take it as the size of the company, which is what it looks like, and you’ve left the family out of Walmart. Divide the cover number by all the shares and you get $49.13 a share. Walmart itself was paying $96.60 that same month. You’d be off by half, and so would every ratio you built on top of it.
When the family sells
In March, a filing signed for all eleven trustees told the SEC that the trust had been selling stock and handing shares out to family members, to meet what it called “investment, personal, and charitable objectives.” The trust kept reporting sales and handouts through June.
Every share the trust sells goes to the market, and the market is exactly who the cover counts. So the cover number can grow in a year when neither the price nor the business moves, just because a family sold some stock.
What market cap leaves out even when it’s right
Whoever takes over a company takes on its debts and gets its cash, both on the balance sheet. So a company with a lot of borrowed money costs more than its market cap says, and one sitting on a pile of cash costs less. Market cap also moves every time the price moves, even on a day when nothing about the business changed. It measures size. In my screener, size is one number on the company’s page, and you can’t filter by it.
Where this breaks
My price is an average: the $96.60 is what Walmart paid over the whole of July 2025. The cover uses the closing price on July 31, and my share count comes from late August. The ownership comes from the April 2025 proxy, and its Vanguard line is older still, since it counts what Vanguard held at the end of 2023. Those gaps are small next to half a company.
Where the line sits is each company’s call. The SEC defines an affiliate by control. Walmart counts its officers, its directors and anyone with 5 percent or more, and Apple counts only its officers and directors. There’s also stock owed to employees that hasn’t been handed over yet, and it isn’t in the share count. At these two it barely matters. At a small company that pays a lot of its people in stock, it can move the number.
What the Waltons kept
In the filings the holding company and the trust make together, every share that leaves comes out of the trust. It held 603,989,702 shares at the end of 2024 and 499,835,752 in late June.
The holding company’s own line is the easy one to skip: Walton Enterprises held 3,002,673,393 shares at the end of 2024, and the same 3,002,673,393 in April 2025, in February 2026 and in April 2026. That block is more than a third of Walmart, and it’s the one the grandchildren now help vote. Market cap prices all of it every day anyway, at whatever a stranger just paid for one share.