Hartono family
Oei Wie Gwan founded PT Djarum in 1951, mixing tobacco with cloves in a small workshop in Kudus, Central Java, to produce kretek cigarettes. After he died in 1963 — the same year a fire nearly destroyed the factory — his sons Robert Budi Hartono and Michael Bambang Hartono took over in their early twenties and began exporting Djarum cigarettes from 1972.
How the fortune was built
The brothers diversified Djarum's tobacco profits into banking, electronics, palm oil, and property. The defining move came in 2002, when a Hartono-linked consortium acquired a roughly 51% controlling stake in Bank Central Asia from Indonesia's bank restructuring agency, following BCA's post-1998 crisis nationalization from the Salim Group — a valuation critics have alleged was below market value, which BCA has denied. The family's stake, now around 55%, sits atop a bank with a market cap exceeding $60 billion.
Where the family invests today
The family's digital-investment arm, GDP Venture, formed in 2010, backed Indonesian internet companies including an early stake in Gojek, plus Halodoc, Tiket.com, and e-commerce platform Blibli, which listed in 2022. Djarum remains family-run, now under Victor Hartono, while BCA remains the group's core financial holding. Michael Bambang Hartono died in March 2026; how that affects family-office leadership isn't yet clear from public reporting.
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