Mitzi Perdue sits on two of American free enterprise's biggest success stories, yet by her own account lives like a working New Yorker with a subway pass.
She was born into the Sheraton hotel family. At 26, she and her siblings inherited their father Ernest Henderson's controlling stake in the hospitality company, now valued at $12.2 billion. Her fortune grew further after marrying her late husband Frank Perdue, the 'chicken king' who built Perdue Farms into America's largest chicken producer, a company that brought in more than $10 billion in revenue in 2024.
'The Hendersons and the Perdues did not encourage extravagance,' Perdue told Fortune. 'In both families, nobody wins points for wearing designer clothes.'
The 85-year-old has access to a family trust and to the Perdue fortune, but she rides the subway instead of booking cars, flies economy on every work trip, takes her shoes to the cobbler rather than replacing them, and rents a one-bedroom apartment in Salisbury, Md.—a building she says several Perdue employees also call home.
'My apartment building I lived in for 14 years is very solidly middle-class, and I love it,' Perdue said. 'If you're always going on private jets, what inkling do you have about the real world?'
Born in 1941 as the fifth Henderson child during wartime, Perdue grew up wearing hand-me-downs before attending public school, then private school, then Harvard. When her father died and the inheritance arrived, she chose not to retire into leisure. 'I could have just put everything in the stock market and let somebody else manage it,' she said. Instead, she bought land near UC Davis to run agricultural experiments and later became a journalist covering farming and mental health.
Since 2022 she has reported on the war in Ukraine and sold her $1.2 million engagement ring from Frank Perdue to fund humanitarian relief there. She is now working on an AI trauma therapist for Ukrainian victims lacking access to care.
'I'm unaware of getting praise for wearing really expensive clothes—you get praised like heck for being an Eagle Scout, or working for Habitat for Humanity,' Perdue said. 'You get praise for serving others.'
Her philosophy, in her own words: 'If you want to be happy, think what you can do for somebody else. If you want to be miserable, think what's owed to you.'
Perdue Farms and Sheraton did not become multibillion-dollar enterprises through subsidy or mandate; they grew through poultry markets and hotel management built over generations of private ownership. What Perdue's example illustrates is a habit increasingly rare in a culture fixated on grievance and redistribution: an heiress who treats capital as a responsibility rather than a license for consumption.
The contrast with the entitlement narrative pushed by progressive commentary is instructive. Perdue did not need government intervention to feel connected to 'the real world'—she chose thrift, work, and philanthropy voluntarily, funded by fortunes that free markets, not bureaucracies, created.
