Steering solar panels to track the sun made Ron Corio the Land of Enchantment’s richest person. Now, he’d prefer to remain out of the spotlight.
Ron Corio was a teenager in New Jersey during the late 1970s when the Iranian Revolution triggered worldwide oil shortages, stranding him in bumper-to-bumper gas lines with his new driver’s license. That got him thinking about alternative energies like solar.
Now, four decades later, his Albuquerque-based solar manufacturer Array Technologies is a frontrunner in the race for renewable energy and Corio is New Mexico’s only billionaire. Forbes estimates that Corio, 61, has a net worth of $1.7 billion, thanks to a series of timely share sales in the shadow of Array’s October 2020 IPO. He is the Land of Enchantment’s wealthiest resident, according to Forbes’ ranking of the richest person in each state, released for the first time since 2019.
After graduating from high school in 1979, Corio followed his older brother to the University of New Mexico where he studied engineering before dropping out to work for a local startup called HDI Research that was developing an automotive ignition system intended to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. It was there that he gained his first solar experience installing a system for HDI’s A-frame wilderness cabin.
“Very few people were interested in solar in the late ‘80s, so Ron was kind of an outsider in the engineering world. People told him that it was a waste of time.”
“I’ve always been mechanically inclined [and] never held any real jobs [before college],” Corio told Albuquerque Business First in a rare 2010 interview. “I fixed people’s cars for money [and then] completed a total of three years at UNM as a part-time student, but my job [at HDI] was very exciting and I lost interest in college. HDI provided one of the best learning experiences I could get, [because] it included electrical and mechanical engineering, materials science and combustion kinetics.”
In 1985, Corio was recruited away by one of his consulting clients–a small solar firm in Albuquerque called Wattsun Corp.–where he stumbled upon the design for his first “solar tracker” while working on a related product intended to function like a series of tiny magnifying glasses for solar panels. The original plan went nowhere, but he realized he was onto something with his idea for a device that would shift the panels throughout the day to track the sun, increasing efficiency and buyers’ return on investment. In 1992, Corio acquired the firm out of financial distress for $55,000, according to Albuquerque Business First, and renamed it Array Technologies.
Today, trackers are an integral part of solar generation, which the International Energy Agency classifies as the world’s fastest growing renewable energy segment. They’re featured in nearly 50% of new solar installations with capacities greater than one megawatt (up from 23% in 2015) and represent an estimated $73 billion (750 gigawatt) opportunity over the 10 years through 2030, according to analyst Annie Rabi Bernard of Wood Mackenzie. The energy research and consulting firm forecasts that projects with capacities greater than one megawatt will account for nearly two-thirds of new solar installations over the next decade.
The “Godfather of Solar,” as Corio is nicknamed, was ahead of his time, says Array’s former chief engineer John Williamson, who worked at the company from 2007 to 2018. “Very few people were interested in solar in the late ‘80s, so he was kind of an outsider in the engineering world, and there were many points in his career where people told him that it was a waste of time or that he should go get a real job,” Williamson says. “Most of the people buying these things early on were hippies and activists in the mountains that had a lot of money and wanted to do solar to make a statement, or people in places like Alaska that were living off the grid where solar was really the only option.”
Corio wasn’t the first person to conceptualize a solar tracker, but he did lead the way in conceiving a commercially viable product that could support the utility market, Williamson says. Selling trackers to the likes of actors Robin Williams and Ed Begley, Jr. (of Arrested Development fame) was a solid business in the early days, but the growth potential was limited. Corio only had about 10 employees working out of a garage when a business development manager for Chinese solar panel producer Suntech named Eben Russell showed up in 2007 to scope out a potential investment. The investment fell through when the financial crisis hit, but Russell liked what he saw and signed on as vice president of sales in 2009, helping lead the company’s charge into the still nascent utility solar market before striking out on his own in 2014 with a parting gift from Corio: an arrangement to resell Array products.
“When I started at Array, there was less than 100 megawatts of utility scale solar in the United States,” Russell says. “Over the next five years, Ron focused on building a great product, while I did all the sales, and we grew to 300 employees selling 2,500 megawatts into a 3,000 megawatt market. We just crushed it.”
In 2014, uncertainty over Congress’ renewal of key investment tax credits brought development to a screeching halt in a solar industry that is highly dependent upon government subsidies, forcing Corio to seriously consider a buyout offer from private equity firm Oaktree Capital Management, according to Russell, who attended the diligence meetings.
“He told Oaktree no and I thought he was nuts,” Russell says. “You had this air pocket in the industry for a year and a half while the investment tax credit got ironed out [with a five year extension by Congress in December 2015]. But he stuck with it and Array had a sales pipeline in front of it when Oaktree came back in 2016.”
Despite the resurgence of demand for Array’s trackers, there were other issues facing the company that year as California-based Nextracker stole its leading share of the market, accounting for nearly 25% of global tracker shipments during the previous 12 months, according to Wood Mackenzie. That may have influenced Corio’s decision to bring Oaktree onboard this time around–and Oaktree’s to replace him as CEO and chief technology officer in 2018. (Array and a lawyer for Corio said in emails that the decision to replace Corio as CEO was not based on the company’s performance and was made in agreement with Corio. Array added that the decision did not influence Corio’s share sales or resignation from the board years later. Corio’s lawyer and the company declined to comment further.)
“I love Ron and the product today is Ron’s product, because there’s hardly been any innovation since he left,” Russell says. “But NextTracker has the dominant global market share today, and it’s not because they have a better product. It’s because they were much better at sales and marketing.” (Array disagreed with that assessment in an email, but declined to comment further. NextTracker went public in February 2023 and is now worth $6.1 billion, roughly 80% more than Array.)
When Corio struck the deal in 2016, he sold an estimated 62% of Array to Oaktree. Terms were not disclosed, but Forbes estimates that Corio received around $300 million before tax, based on the $200 million of acquisition-related debt disclosed by Array and the 50% average debt-to-equity ratio of leveraged buyouts in 2016 per Pitchbook–likely a significant premium to what was offered two years earlier. Oaktree declined to comment for this story.
Corio retained an estimated 38% stake in Array as part of the deal and remained on the company’s board as it geared up to go public. With sales of nearly $900 million and 17% of a booming industry’s global shipments under its belt (trailing only Nextracker’s 29%), Array debuted on the Nasdaq in October 2020. The timing could not have been better.
As part of the IPO, an investment vehicle controlled by Oaktree sold 40% of Array at $22 per share for $1 billion. Corio, who held his shares in the vehicle, got a pre-tax cash payout of around $500 million for half his stake. To top things off, Array took on $575 million of new debt to pay the investment vehicle an additional $589 million special cash dividend. Forbes estimates that Corio received about $200 million of the latter total before taxes.
Then, as Array’s stock quickly soared to its all-time high of $51 per share in late January 2021, the investment vehicle dumped the rest of its (and Corio’s) holdings in a series of secondary or “seasoned” offerings–at $35 per share in December 2020 and at $28 per share the following March–generating another $2.3 billion of cash, including $720 million (before tax) for Corio’s last remaining shares of the company.
More good timing. The stock cratered by nearly 50% to $13 per share in a single day during May 2021 after management withdrew its guidance for the year, citing the fact that it no longer felt it could raise prices high enough to pass on its soaring steel and freight costs to customers and that margins would take a hit. The stock bottomed out at $6 a year later, but Corio was in the clear, having swapped his estimated 38% stake in Array for $1.2 billion of cash (before tax) within six months of taking the company public–after founding it three decades earlier. Those shares would now be worth roughly $1 billion today, thanks to Array’s recent rebound to near its $22 per share IPO price, though Corio has likely benefited from diversifying his portfolio at a time when the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both outperformed Array’s stock.
“It’s funny thinking of Ron as a billionaire, because he’s just not that type of guy,” says Array’s former chief engineer John Williamson. “The last time I saw him he was moving a bunch of rocks in his garden, and I told him ‘you can afford to pay someone to do that.’ He said he needed the exercise.”
Investors didn’t find the timing of Oaktree’s (or Corio’s) stock sales funny, filing a series of ongoing lawsuits claiming they were misled by management, Corio and Oaktree, among others, about the impact of rising costs in order to force through the IPO and seasoned offerings at higher prices. Array, Corio and Oaktree denied the allegations in legal filings, and the first of three lawsuits was dismissed on May 19, pending a possible appeal (lawyers for the plaintiffs did not respond to Forbes’ requests for comment.)
In his decision, the judge likened the allegation that Oaktree and Corio were unduly motivated to complete the offerings to a “conspiracy theory,” since neither of them made any of the alleged misstatements by management. Likely making matters worse for the plaintiffs: “If those statements were crafted as forward looking and hopeful, with cautionary statements that they may not be able to [pass on costs to customers], then there is a forward looking safe harbor for the seasoned offerings [at $35 and $28 per share] that could negate liability,” says University of Michigan law professor Adam Pritchard.
According to Guggenheim analyst Joe Osha, Array likely represents a promising bet going forward, now that management has its margin issues under control. “The whole industry was basically taking open exposure by quoting customers and then buying steel in the future without locking in pricing, assuming that it would always go down,” Osha explains. “Now, Array contracts with suppliers at the same time it quotes its customers or enters into variable pricing arrangements tied to iron ore and shipping indices on both sides of its supply chain.”
“If you go back to when they IPO’d, there was a different capital market environment with a lot higher valuations,” adds Truist Securities analyst Jordan Levy. “But I think the industry outlook has gotten a lot stronger since then with more clarity on the investment tax credit for solar and lot of big projects that have been announced since the Inflation Reduction Act [passed by Congress in August 2022 with $391 billion earmarked to support clean energy and address climate change].”
Corio won’t be around to take advantage of that opportunity, having resigned from the board in November 2022 without any explanation, other than a company filing indicating the decision “was not the result of any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies, or practices.” His decision to cash out and leave doesn’t surprise Array’s former vice president of sales Eben Russell.
“I think Ron’s either going to be all in or out,” Russell says. “He’s a micro-engineer and wants to be in daily team meetings, scrutinizing every choice of fastener, because he doesn’t trust a single bolt. So, I think he’s getting a taste of the leisure life.”
He’s also spending some of his time on philanthropy, having seeded his Los Ranchos-based Corio Foundation with $40 million in 2017 and subsequently doled out a fifth of that total to charitable organizations like Doctors Without Borders, the Mayo Clinic and the Environmental Defense Fund as of June 2021. In February 2022, the foundation announced the Corio Aspiring Innovators Program, which will fund 24 prep school scholarships a year in Albuquerque for at least five years.
Will that be enough to occupy the newly self-employed entrepreneur? Unlikely, according to his former chief engineer John Williamson, who says he’s already heard from Corio about some new ideas for technological development.
“Ron once told me he was going home to watch a movie with his family, and I couldn’t imagine him sitting still for that long because his brain is always working. He’s definitely not the kind of guy that will want to sit on the sidelines forever.”