S tefano Pessina is an Italian-Monegasque billionaire who is the architect of the world's largest pharmacy-led health and wellness enterprise, Walgreens Boots Alliance. A nuclear engineer by training, he took over his family's small pharmaceutical wholesale business in the 1970s and embarked on a relentless, decades-long series of mergers and acquisitions. He transformed his family's company, Alliance Santè, into Alliance UniChem, which then merged with the British pharmacy chain Boots Group to create Alliance Boots.

His most audacious move was the two-step acquisition of the American pharmacy giant Walgreens. This complex deal, completed in 2014, created Walgreens Boots Alliance, a global behemoth with thousands of drugstores and a massive pharmaceutical wholesale and distribution business. As the executive chairman and largest individual shareholder of the publicly traded company, Pessina is a dominant and powerful figure in the global healthcare industry. He is known for his sharp financial acumen and his mastery of the complex, large-scale corporate deal.