Get to Know One of the World's Youngest Female Billionaire: A Drag-Racing Burger Queen

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Ever hear of Lynsi Torres? No? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. A lot of people have never heard of the 30-year-old billionaire owner and president of In-N-Out Burgers.

And it’s a real shame, because as far as we can tell, she sounds exciting:

As owner and president of In-N-Out Burgers, Lynsi Torres is one of the youngest female billionaires on Earth, according to Bloomberg.

“They have done a fantastic job of building and maintaining a kind of cult following,” Bob Goldin, executive vice president of Chicago-based food industry research firm Technomic Inc., tells Bloomberg. “Someone would love to buy them.”

And although it doesn’t match the type of revenue McDonald’s enjoys, the successful and much-loved burger chain is doing just fine.

Bob Johnson Photography

“The thrice-married Torres has watched her family expand In-N-Out from a single drive-through hamburger stand founded in 1948 in Baldwin Park by her grandparents, Harry and Esther Snyder, into a fast-food empire worth more than $1 billion,” Bloomberg notes.

"The closely held company had sales of about $625 million in 2012, after applying a five-year compound annual growth rate of 4.6 percent to industry trade magazine Nation’s Restaurant News’s 2011 sales estimate of $596 million," the report adds.

However, all estimates concerning Torres’ wealth and the restaurants net worth are based on Bloomberg’s calculations -- and the chain’s vice president of planning and development disputes these figures.

“In-N-Out Burger is a private company and this valuation of the company is nothing more than speculation based on estimates from people with no knowledge of In-N-Out’s financials, which are and always have been private,” Carl Van Fleet told Bloomberg in an e-mailed statement.

Here’s Torres’ at one of her rare business-related public appearances: The opening of an In-N-Out in Texas. (Courtesy The Dallas Morning News).

Torres declined to comment on the report, which isn’t surprising considering her penchant for keeping out of the spotlight. Speaking of which, what do we know about her? How is a 30-years-old running a successful fast food chain?

Again, Bloomberg provides us with some details:

When her grandfather Harry died in 1976, his second son, Rich, took over as company president and expanded the chain to 93 restaurants from 18.

Torres’s father, Harry Guy Snyder, became chief executive following Rich’s 1993 death in a plane crash at age 41. The chain expanded to 140 locations under Guy, who inherited his father’s passion for drag racing.

Tragically, however, her father died of a prescription drug overdose in 1999. He was 49. The company then traded hands to Torres’ grandmother, Esther, until her death in 2006. She was 86.

After Ether’s passing, that left Lynsi Torres as the sole heir to the burger empire.

“The company has no other owners, according to an Arizona state corporation commission filing,” the report notes.

Lynsi Torres. (screen grab).

But that’s not all she inherited. She also inherited her father’s passion for fast cars. In fact, her love of competitive drag racing is one of the few things that can convince the otherwise quiet and reclusive owner to come out into the open [h/t: Business Insider]:

And we’re not exaggerating when we say she likes to keep to herself. Very few people in the industry have ever met or know anything about the In-N-Out chief.

“I have no clue about her,” Janet Lowder, a Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., restaurant consultant, told Bloomberg. “I was even surprised there was a granddaughter.”

When Torres was younger, kids used to tease her because her father flipped burgers for a living, according to the Daily Mail. Now she owns this $17.4 million mansion. Life’s funny like that. (Image courtesy Sotheby’s).

So what do we know? Well, we know this:

• She apparently has no formal training in management
• She has no college degree
• She hates giving interviews
• She has twins
• She “inherited her Uncle Rich’s interest in religion, funding a non-profit organization called Healing Hearts & Nations that proselytizes in Africa,” as Bloomberg’s Seth Lubove reports

And that’s about it. Other than what we’ve laid out in the above, the competitive drag racing burger heiress remains a bit of a mystery, which is a shame because she sounds like fun.

Click here to read Bloomberg’s in-depth take on Miss Torres.

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Featured image courtesy Bob Johnson Photography.