Hamid R. Moghadam

Born on August 26, 1956, in Tehran, Imperial State of Iran. He grew up in Tehran, where his father was a businessman. In 1969 he attended Aiglon College in Switzerland.

In 1973, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in engineering. In 1980 Moghadam received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California.

Abbey, Moghadam & Company

After business school, Moghadam started his career at Homestake Mining Company. He later joined John McMahan Associates. In 1983, he and Douglas Abbey founded Abbey, Moghadam & Company in San Francisco, California. Although they planned to provide investment advisory services, according to Forbes, they soon became known for instead "helping investors revive underperforming assets." They were joined by T. Robert Burke in 1984 and established AMB Institutional Realty Advisors, later named AMB Property Corp., with initial investments in office, industrial and community shopping centers.

Going public with AMB

In the late 1980s, AMB changed its investment strategy to focus on industrial parks and shopping centers in infill trade areas, with the company beginning to exit the office market in 1987. During the collapse of the office building market in the late 1980s, this shift in assets helped the company avoid significant financial repercussions. AMB launched its first private equity fund in 1989, which focused on industrial and retail properties. AMB consolidated several of its investment funds in 1997 and went public as an REIT. In late 1997, AMB closed its IPO with more than US$2.8 billion in assets.

Throughout 1999, Moghadam "made a series of moves that pared the company of most of its retail holdings, following the notion that e-commerce would become the high-margin road of the future." Selling its retail business around 1999 to focus solely on the industrial sector, starting that year AMB sold nearly $1 billion in retail assets to institutional investors and reallocated funds into warehouses in and around major consumption areas. By the end of 1999, AMB was the second-largest industrially focused REIT in the United States, with a total market capitalization of $3.5 billion. President and CEO of AMB Property Corporation, he became AMB chairman in 2000. AMB made its first overseas investment in 2002, developing a facility for Procter & Gamble in Mexico City. In 2002, AMB initiated an international expansion program focused on buying and developing distribution facilities near global trade hubs, particularly in growth markets such as Latin America, Asia, and Europe. AMB added an internal development division in 2004.

Moghadam and his wife Christina have a son together. In American politics, as of 2016, Moghadam had endorsed both Republicans and Democrats.

In July 2022, Moghdam was robbed at gunpoint outside his home in San Francisco. He relocated to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2025.

Moghadam has served on various philanthropic and community boards in the San Francisco Bay Area. He served on the boards of Town School for Boys, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and he was chairman of the Young Presidents' Organization's Northern California chapter.

Previously a trustee of Stanford University, Moghadam is currently a board member of the Stanford Management Company, and was its former chairman. He and his wife established the Moghadam Family Professorship in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he serves on the advisory council, after endowing the Stanford Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies in 2006, which focuses on undergraduate courses related to Iran.