Stephens Inc.

Stephens Inc. is a privately held investment bank in Little Rock, founded in 1933 by Witt Stephens as a dealer in defaulted municipal bonds. Jackson Stephens was its chief executive from 1956 to 1986 and his son Warren Stephens from 1986 to 2025. In the 1980s it handled 61 percent by value of the bonds issued in Arkansas.¹²

Business

The firm took Walmart public in 1970, when the retailer had 32 million dollars in annual revenue, and later underwrote Tyson Foods and Alltel, directing Tyson's 1.5 billion dollar purchase of Holly Farms in 1989. In 1971 it underwrote 113 million dollars in bonds for the Louisiana Superdome, then the largest municipal issue in the South. It held 80 percent of the bank data processor Systematics, which was sold to Alltel in 1990. The family's gas company, Stephens Production, has paid an estimated billion dollars in dividends. In 1993 the family bought the Donrey Media Group of 52 newspapers, among them the Las Vegas Review-Journal, with twelve outdoor advertising franchises, seven cable systems, and a television station. The Department of Justice sued in 1995 to block its purchase of the Northwest Arkansas Times, and Judge Franklin Waters held that it would control 85 percent of the market. Walter Hussman, publisher of the rival Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, said: "The Stephens people think of themselves as businessmen first and then journalists." The newspapers were sold in 2015.¹³

Financial General

In 1977 Stephens Inc. held 4.9 percent of Financial General Bankshares of Washington. When the Bank of Credit and Commerce International began buying the company for four Middle Eastern clients, the daily purchases were made by George H. Davis, "an officer of Stephens, Inc.," limited to 10,000 shares a day, through an account at the firm opened in the name of "Eugene J. Metzger, Agent" in order, a federal court found, "to shield the identity of the BCCI principals." The firm sold 70,000 of its own shares into the accumulation on January 6, 1978. It was a defendant in the company's suit and in that of the Securities and Exchange Commission, consented to an injunction on March 18, 1978, and won summary judgment in July.⁴

Lippo and Washington

The family formed Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong with Mochtar Riady of the Lippo Group in 1978, and the two families shared control of Worthen Bank from 1983. James Riady had been an intern at the firm. In 1985 it underwrote the stock issue that rescued Worthen, and its officer Curt Bradbury took over the bank. In 1987 it arranged the refinancing of Harken Energy, of which George W. Bush was a director, through Union Bank of Switzerland. A Senate committee recorded that John Huang, while at the Commerce Department in 1994 and 1995 and receiving briefings from the CIA, kept the use, unknown to anyone at the department, of a spare office at the firm's Washington branch on the sixth floor of the Willard Building, across the street, headed by Vernon Weaver. The firm gave 100,000 dollars to a dinner for President George H.W. Bush in May 1991, and family members and employees gave more than 83,000 dollars to Bill Clinton by the summer of 1992.²⁵⁶

In May 2006 the businesses were divided. Warren Stephens kept the investment bank, and Witt Stephens's children formed the Stephens Group. Warren Stephens became ambassador to the United Kingdom in 2025.¹