Haitian-American billionaire Herriot Tabuteau now worth $2.2 billion

Haiti-born billionaire Herriot Tabuteau has seen his fortune climb to $2.2 billion after shares of his drug company, Axsome Therapeutics, doubled over nine months on the back of a newly approved Alzheimer’s treatment.

The New York-based biotech was worth $6.1 billion last October. Its market value has since climbed to $12.6 billion, a run that has left far larger names behind. Over the same stretch, Alphabet rose 45%, Eli Lilly gained 57% and Nvidia added just 7%.

Driving the surge is Auvelity, Axsome’s treatment for the agitation that often accompanies Alzheimer’s disease. The drug won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval and reached the market only weeks ago. Tabuteau said the early response had been strong.

The approval opens a large market. More than 7 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s, and Axsome estimates that up to 76% of them experience agitation. Until now, doctors have relied on antipsychotics to manage those symptoms, drugs that carry serious risks, including death. The FDA underscored the significance by noting that Auvelity is the first non-antipsychotic cleared for the condition.

Federal scrutiny of antipsychotic use has been mounting. A March report from the Health and Human Services inspector general found troubling patterns of inappropriate prescribing across nursing homes, an issue it described as a longstanding concern for lawmakers.

Tabuteau, 57, has built Axsome by working against the grain of the drug industry. He founded the company in 2012 with a focus on brain disorders, a field known for high failure rates and hard-to-prove results. Rather than court venture capital, he financed the early work with money from family and friends.

When Axsome went public in 2015, investors were unconvinced, and the stock traded below $10 for years. The picture changed in August 2022, when Auvelity gained approval for major depressive disorder. Shares jumped 65% in a week and the company’s value climbed to $3 billion.

Now Tabuteau expects the Auvelity franchise alone to reach $8 billion in peak annual sales, up from an earlier projection of $6 billion, and he has expanded the sales team to chase that goal. The drug could eventually be tested against agitation in other forms of dementia, including Lewy body and vascular dementia.

Revenue is climbing quickly. Axsome booked $709 million over the 12 months through the first quarter, up 64% from a year earlier. William Blair analyst Myles Minter projects sales of $975 million this year and $1.7 billion in 2027, pointing to a deep pipeline that gives the company what he called multiple shots on goal, including treatments for cataplexy tied to narcolepsy and for fibromyalgia.

Tabuteau’s background sets him apart from most biotech founders. Born in Haiti and trained at Yale School of Medicine, he spent years in finance before turning to drug development, with stints at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities and the hedge fund operation tied to S.A.C. Capital, along with running his own funds. He is among a very small group of Haitian-born billionaires tracked by Forbes, which recently named him to its list of the 250 most successful living immigrants in America.

That financial instinct has shaped the company’s dealmaking. In late 2021, Axsome bought the daytime sleepiness drug Sunosi for $53 million plus royalties, then recovered its outlay by selling the rights for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The company has kept buying. Since November, it has picked up two more experimental drugs, one for epilepsy and another for schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome. It landed the epilepsy candidate by acquiring a small biotech that had licensed the therapy from AstraZeneca, a deal that started at just $300,000 upfront with milestone payments that could reach $83 million, plus royalties. It bought the schizophrenia and Tourette’s drug from Japan’s Takeda for an undisclosed price.

Tabuteau said the Takeda asset was not on the market but that Axsome approached the company after its own research flagged the drug’s potential. He expects it to enter late-stage trials in schizophrenia patients by year’s end.

He has set an aggressive pace for the years ahead, aiming to file at least one new drug application annually from this year through 2030. Axsome submitted an application for its narcolepsy medication earlier in 2026.

Tabuteau frames the current run as an early chapter. He says the broader pipeline could one day generate more than $20 billion in peak sales, leaving what he describes as plenty of room left to grow.