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Arthur Blank created the world’s largest home improvement retailer from the ground up. But building a championship caliber football team? That’s proven to be a bit tougher to construct.

Arthur Blank co-founded Home Depot in 1978 and stayed with the company for 23 years, serving as COO, CEO, and co-Chairman before stepping away from the business in 2001.

A year after leaving Home Depot, Blank took $545 million from his fortune and bought the Atlanta Falcons. Today, the franchise is worth more than ten times that with a value of $6.4 billion. In fact, the value of the team shot up 22% from 2024 to 2025 alone.

But Blank was no stranger to financial success when he took over the Falcons. In September of 1981, he took Home Depot public on the Nasdaq with an initial public offering of $12 per share. When he left the company on May 30th of 2001, Home Depot’s stock price was more than four times what it was at its IPO. Today, the do-it-yourself retailer is worth more than $400 a share, and has a market cap of about $406 billion.

If you were to have invested $1,000 in Home Depot when it went public, your shares would be worth roughly $19.5 million today.

But financial success is where the similarities end. Home Depot has continued to dominate the home improvement space even after Blank’s departure, now operating more than 2,300 stores in three countries.

The Falcons, however, have been the definition of mediocrity under Arthur Blank. The team has posted a regular season record of 186 wins, 185 losses, and 1 tie under his ownership. The Falcons have made the playoffs just eight times, and have one very memorable Super Bowl loss to Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. So maybe Blank’s success will have to be measured in dollar signs rather than touchdowns.