Jessica Pegula needed 56 minutes on 2 September to remove Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, from the US Open by a score of 6-3, 6-1. Three days earlier she had done much the same to Elena-Gabriela Ruse in straight sets. She is 32, seeded third, and 47-12 for the season. She is also the daughter of Terry and Kim Pegula, who own the Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Sabres, which means that every time she plays a major, two entirely separate valuations are running at once: hers, expressed in ranking points, and her family’s, expressed in billions. Only one of them has ever gone down.
Third round
The 2026 US Open began on 30 August at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens and runs to 13 September. Pegula’s third-round opponent is No. 31 Leylah Fernandez of Canada, which makes it a meeting of two former US Open finalists, both of whom lost the match that mattered. Fernandez lost hers in 2021. Pegula lost hers in 2024, to Aryna Sabalenka, in her first Grand Slam final at the age of 30 after fifteen years as a professional.
Since then she has been the sport’s most reliable near-miss: semi-finals at the US Open in 2025, semi-finals at the Australian Open in 2026, and a world ranking that has hovered between three and five without ever touching the top. That last part is live. Should she take the title in New York, and should Elena Rybakina lose before the semi-finals, Pegula becomes world No. 1 for the first time. It is the kind of two-part conditional that tennis produces every fortnight and almost never delivers.
She turned professional in 2009. The trophy cabinet at the majors remains empty. The bank, as we shall see, does not.
Carbondale, 1983
Terry Pegula was born in March 1951 in Carbondale, in northeast Pennsylvania, and founded the oil-and-gas exploration company East Resources in 1983 with $7,500 borrowed from friends and family, according to Bloomberg’s profile of him. That is the entire origin story, and it is the only part of the Pegula fortune that sounds like a parable.
In 2010 he sold the bulk of East Resources’ assets to Royal Dutch Shell for $4.7 billion. In 2011 he bought the Buffalo Sabres for $189 million. In 2014 he bought the Buffalo Bills for a then-NFL-record $1.4 billion, outbidding groups led by Donald Trump and Bon Jovi, per Forbes. Eleven months of hockey and one of the coldest football markets in America, purchased with hydrocarbon money, by a man from a coal town, in the city where his daughter was born in February 1994.
Forbes put his real-time net worth at $9.3 billion around March 2026, up nearly $2 billion since the list published in 2025, as reported by WKBW in Buffalo. The increase did not require him to do anything in particular. American sports franchises have spent the decade behaving like a scarce commodity, because that is what they are.
The assets
Sportico’s 2025 NFL valuations put the Bills at $5.87 billion, more than quadruple the 2014 purchase price. Forbes had the club at $5.95 billion as of August 2025 and the Sabres at $1.325 billion as of December 2025; Bloomberg cites a slightly higher Sabres figure of $1.36 billion, drawn from a Sportico report in October 2025. Sports Illustrated reports that the Bills’ value is expected to rise again in 2026 with the opening of the new $2.2 billion Highmark Stadium, a building that will, in the way of these things, make the asset more valuable than the sum spent on it.
There has also been a small, quiet retreat. Pegula sold roughly 20 per cent of the Bills to ten limited partners under the NFL’s new institutional-investment rules, according to reporting carried by Yahoo Sports. Selling a fifth of an appreciating asset to people who get no say in it is not a retreat at all, of course. It is a valuation event with catering.
Set the numbers side by side and the shape of the family becomes clear. One member of it is trying to win something that cannot be bought, at a venue in Queens, in three-set increments, against opponents ranked in the thirties. The rest of the portfolio compounds while she does it.
The succession
In June 2022, Kim Pegula suffered a cardiac arrest at the family’s home in Florida. Her daughter Kelly performed CPR. Jessica disclosed all of this herself, in a Players’ Tribune essay in February 2023, and said her mother was dealing with significant expressive aphasia and significant memory issues. Kim Pegula was born in Seoul; there is no record of her birth name or her biological parents. She married Terry in 1993 and became co-owner and president of Pegula Sports and Entertainment, one of the few women running an NFL franchise’s business operations at all.
What the family has said publicly is the extent of what is known, and the extent of what will be repeated here.
On the ownership side, the picture is thinner than the internet suggests. One outlet, AOL, citing The Athletic, has reported that in 2023 Terry transferred a small percentage of the Bills to his daughter Laura, long involved in the family petroleum business, in order to comply with the NFL’s succession-planning policy. That is a single-source account, and no party has publicly disputed it or anything else. Terry has five children: Michael and Laura from his first marriage, to Anne Shirley, and Jessica, Kelly and Matthew with Kim. Which of them, beyond Laura, holds any formal equity in the Bills or the Sabres has not been established anywhere in the public record, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.
Including, it should be said, most of the people typing “Jessica Pegula billionaire heiress” into a search bar this week.
Her own ledger
Here is the figure that is actually verifiable. Jessica Pegula’s career prize money stands at $24,198,338 per WTA data, which places her 21st on the all-time earnings list. No personal net worth for her has been published by Forbes or Bloomberg. There is no consolidated Pegula family number in any billionaire index; the trackers report Terry’s individual fortune and stop there.
So the honest accounting reads: one heiress, one nine-figure surname, and roughly $24.2 million she has hit for herself, one prize cheque at a time, since 2009.
She has also spent this season on the wrong side of a purse negotiation, which is a strange position for a billionaire’s daughter and precisely why it carries weight. As a WTA Player Council voice, Pegula told Just Women’s Sports that players had paused protest plans at this year’s US Open until organisers released official tournament prize money figures, with a boycott still under discussion. The woman who least needs the money is arguing for it on behalf of players ranked outside the top hundred. That is either excellent politics or simply the correct position, and the two are not mutually exclusive.
Otherwise the life is conspicuously unshowy. Her husband, Taylor Gahagen, is a Buffalo native who at one point worked for her parents; they married in 2021 at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. She and Kelly once co-founded a restaurant venture, Healthy Scratch, which has since closed. A failed small business is an unusual thing to find in a $9.3 billion family, and a reassuring one.
The Fernandez match comes next. Two former finalists, neither with a Slam, in a tournament where Pegula has now made the final, the semi-finals and, this fortnight, the third round in 56 minutes. The stadium in Buffalo cost $2.2 billion and will open regardless. The trophy in Queens costs nothing and cannot be acquired.
She has to win it.
