Shahid Khan

Shahid Rafiq Khan was born on July 18, 1950 in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan, to a middle-class Punjabi Muslim family involved in the construction industry. His father, Rafiq Khan, owned a shop that sold survey and drawing equipment, while his mother Zakia Khan was a professor of mathematics. Shahid Khan also has a younger brother named Faran Khan, a local businessman in Pakistan.

Khan moved to the United States in 1967 at age 16 to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. When he went to the United States, Khan spent his first night in a $2/night room at the university Young Men's Christian Association, and his first job was washing dishes for $1.20 an hour. Khan joined the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at the school and graduated from the Grainger College of Engineering with a BSc in industrial engineering in 1971. He was later awarded the Mechanical Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in 1999.

Flex-N-Gate

Khan worked at the automotive manufacturing company Flex-N-Gate Corporation while attending the University of Illinois. When he graduated, Khan was hired as the engineering director for the company. In 1978, he started Bumper Works, which made car bumpers for customized pickup trucks and body shop repairs. The funds to start the new business included a $50,000 loan from the Small Business Administration and $16,000 of his own savings.

In 1980, Khan bought Flex-N-Gate from his former employer Charles Gleason Butzow, bringing Bumper Works into the fold. The company grew under him, so that it supplied bumpers for the Big Three automakers. In 1984, Khan began supplying a small number of bumpers for Toyota pickups. By 1987, it was the sole supplier for Toyota pickups, and by 1989, it was the sole supplier for the entire Toyota line in the United States. Adopting the Toyota Way increased company efficiency and ability to change its manufacturing process within a few minutes. Since then, the company has grown from $17 million in sales to an estimated $2 billion in 2010 to $8.89 billion in 2020. Its operation in Sandusky, Ohio is one of the largest automotive light manufacturing plants in the United States.

By 2019, Flex-N-Gate had 25,000 employees and 69 manufacturing plants in the United States, China, Argentina, Spain, France, Germany, Mexico and Canada. In 2020, it had a revenue of $8.9 billion and was ranked as the 46th largest privately held American company by Forbes. It is also ranked by Automotive News as the seventh largest American automotive parts supplier and overall 33rd largest supplier in the world.

Khan is a cultural Muslim. Khan met Ann Carlson (now Ann Carlson Khan) at the University of Illinois in 1967 and dated her for ten years before they married in 1977. They have two children together, a daughter named Shanna and a son, Tony. Khan became a naturalized American citizen in 1991.

Khan owns a house in Naples, Florida, and an apartment in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood. He owned the superyacht Kismet until he sold it to Eric Schmidt in September 2023, who renamed it to Whisper. Khan built a new, larger superyacht in 2024 with the same Kismet name.

Political views

In 2016, Khan supported the Republican Party and Donald Trump's presidential campaign. He was among the NFL team owners who donated to Trump for his inauguration fund. However, in 2017, Khan was critical of the Trump administration's "Muslim immigration ban". Nevertheless, he later voiced support for Trump's economic policies while reassuring his opposition to Trump's social policies.

In July 2019, Khan met Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and stated that he is "the best thing that’s happened to Pakistan".