Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Isaac Tshuva, the Everyman

Isaac Tshuva, the Israeli energy king whose $2 billion net worth makes him the country’s sixth-richest citizen, is not one for opulence.

Yes, at 61, Tshuva owns the Delek Group, which helped discover the Tamar field, 7.7 trillion cubic feet of gas near the Haifa coast that could help wean Israel from imported coal and gas. His global empire also includes, but is not limited to, luxury apartment towers in cities as varied as Los Angeles and Singapore, power plants, gas stations and New York’s Plaza Hotel.

But Tshuva’s idiosyncrasies suggest he’s more of an everyman. According to a profile in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek, the Libyan-born, Israeli-bred billionaire:

  • Eschews ties
  • Drives his own car (a beige 2008 Cadillac Sedan)
  • Is just as comfortable with a fancy PowerPoint presentation as he is with a table surface and a handful of sugar packets to illustrate which gas deposits he owns in Israel
  • Works at an office located between an IKEA and a brewery
  • Refuses to wear a watch because, at his bar mitzvah, his parents couldn’t afford one

Considering the magnates controlling America’s most powerful companies, Tshuva’s lifestyle is certainly worth consideration.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.