The Walmart billionaires next door: Quiet backlash is brewing against the heirs who remade the retailer’s hometown

Sam Walton’s favorite ice cream, butter pecan, is always available at the Spark Café, in the quaint town square of Bentonville, Ark. Next door is Walton’s 5&10, the five-and-dime store where in 1950, “Mr. Sam,” as he was known locally, planted the seeds of Walmart, a retail empire that became the biggest company in America. That little shop is now a museum, and parked outside is a replica of Mr. Sam’s red 1979 Ford F150, the pickup truck he used to tool around town in, often with his dog Ol’ Roy.

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Venture out beyond the square, and the small-town USA illusion breaks. The population of the town surrounding Walmart’s sleek new multibillion-dollar headquarters has soared from about 6,000 in the 1970s to more than 60,000 today, and it’s expected to triple in coming decades as the company attracts top tech and management talent from coastal cities.

The feeling is more glossy high-design hub than Norman Rockwell painting. There’s a Soho House-like private social club and spa, boutique hotels, chef-driven restaurants, speakeasies. At the private-jet-filled municipal airport, you can drink a cappuccino and watch vintage planes take off. There are sprawling parks and playgrounds, paved walking paths, and hundreds of miles of mountain biking trails. The expanding 200,000-square-foot Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art sits on a landscaped 134-acre campus and is free to the public, as is the music and arts center The Momentary.

Much of Bentonville’s transformation has been bankrolled, directed, and shaped by the Walton family, whose approximately 44% stake in Walmart makes them one of the richest families on earth. Walmart is now worth around $1 trillion. Through their various hospitality and investment groups, and their philanthropies, Sam Walton’s children and grandchildren have helped remake the town as a kind of urban utopia in the Ozarks.

On the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.Christina Horsten—picture alliance/Getty Images

“They are like royalty in Bentonville,” said Charu Thomas, who chairs the board of Bentonville-based supply-chain tech company Ox and lived there for several years. “It’s a little bit bizarre.”

Lately, however, something has changed. As the Waltons have become more and more involved in the city’s development, some have started to express harsh skepticism about their intentions. In a region where the family seems to have a part in every aspect of life, the closing of a restaurant they own or even a generous loan to the city can cause backlash.

Simmering resentments came to a head in 2023 in the tiny nearby town of Jasper when it was revealed that two Walton grandchildren were exploring whether there would be support to pursue national park and preserve status for one of Arkansas’s most important natural icons, the Buffalo National River. Locals, fired up by rumors that such a redesignation could lead to unwelcome tourism, development, or even them being pushed off their land, packed a town hall meeting. They erupted in applause at an anti-elite country song one indignant resident had reworked: “Rich Men Not From Here.” It was very clear who the “rich men” were. A Republican state senator who spoke against the redesignation campaigned this year with flyers boasting: “Bryan King said no to the billionaires,” and won reelection in March.

Stunned by the firestorm they set off, the Waltons dropped the effort to redesignate the river. But the outcry marked a tidal shift in sentiment and exposed long-festering resentments. It underscores a split that has existed in America as long as the nation has, between rural and urban, rich and poor. That divide has grown especially raw lately, as the wealth gap widens and a populist backlash against billionaires has gathered force.

Residents around Jasper, where the Waltons own Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, were upset that two Walton grandchildren had funded a survey about redesignating the Buffalo National River.Desiree Rios for Fortune

As the ultrawealthy fund political campaigns and amass influence, the billionaire class has been under fire. In California, progressives and unions are pushing for a “wealth tax.” In New York, efforts by billionaires to defeat a democratic socialist mayoral candidate backfired spectacularly.

In Bentonville, there are no protesters marching with signs. But growing pushback against the Waltons is showing up in snarky Instagram posts and damning opinion pieces in magazines. It goes to the heart of a community that has for decades revered and identified with Sam Walton and his kin—and to some of the inherent tensions in large-scale civic philanthropy.

Few families in American history have given, invested, and loaned so much capital to a small community. And the community certainly values them: Indeed, a former governor told me he worked to reduce Arkansas’s tax rates specifically to entice some of the Waltons to move back.

> $440 billion

Approximate value of the Walton family’s owne