Serena Jameka Williams was born on September 26, 1981, in Saginaw, Michigan, the youngest of five daughters of Richard Williams and Oracene Price, according to Wikipedia. When she was a toddler the family relocated to Compton, California, where her father, who had never played competitive tennis himself, taught himself the game from books and instructional videos before coaching Serena and her older sister Venus on the city’s public courts. Growing up in Compton exposed the sisters early to a far rougher backdrop than most future Grand Slam champions experience, including the 2003 murder of their eldest half-sister, Yetunde Price, a loss that later shaped the family’s philanthropic work. Richard Williams’s unconventional, hands-on coaching approach, built around discipline and a long-term plan mapped out years before either daughter turned professional, became one of the most examined origin stories in modern sports.

Serena began playing tennis at around age four, drilling for hours on cracked public courts alongside Venus under their father’s direction, according to Wikipedia. In the early 1990s the family moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, so the sisters could train at a well-known junior academy, before Richard Williams pulled them off the traditional junior tournament circuit to coach them himself, a decision that drew heavy criticism from the tennis establishment at the time. Serena turned professional in October 1995 at age 14, though her results lagged behind Venus’s for several years while she worked to add power and consistency to a game still built more on raw talent than polish. Her rise to the top of the sport came later than many expected for a player with her ability, a slower build that made her breakthrough at the end of the decade all the more striking.

Williams’s defining early moment came at the 1999 US Open, where the 17-year-old defeated top-ranked Martina Hingis in the final to win her first Grand Slam singles title, becoming the first Black woman to win a major singles championship since Althea Gibson in 1958, according to Olympics.com. The victory immediately marked her as a threat to the sport’s established order, and within four years she completed the “Serena Slam,” holding all four major singles titles at once across the 2002 French Open, 2002 Wimbledon, 2002 US Open, and 2003 Australian Open, a run that also carried her past Venus to the world number one ranking for the first time. That stretch of finals played against her own sister, unusual in the history of professional sport, turned the pair into the dominant storyline in tennis and set the template for the two decades of success that followed.

Over a professional career spanning 27 years, Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of any player in the Open Era and second all-time only to Margaret Court’s 24, a total built from seven Australian Open, three French Open, seven Wimbledon, and six US Open championships. She completed a Career Golden Slam in singles by winning Olympic gold at the London 2012 Games, a feat matched only by Steffi Graf, and finished with four Olympic gold medals overall, three of them in women’s doubles alongside Venus. Williams also spent 319 weeks at world number one, the third-longest reign in WTA history, and retired with 73 WTA singles titles and $94.8 million in career prize money, the most any woman has ever earned in tennis, according to Sportico. Her sustained dominance across three separate eras of the sport, still winning majors against players a decade younger well into her thirties, is widely cited as one of the more remarkable longevity records in professional sports.

Williams announced her departure from professional tennis in a widely covered essay in August 2022, describing it as an “evolution” away from the sport rather than a traditional retirement, and played her final match that September at the US Open, according to Wikipedia. Nearly four years later, at age 44, she returned to competition at Wimbledon in 2026, having re-entered the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s anti-doping testing pool at the end of 2025 to regain eligibility, a process she publicly criticized as unreasonably strict, according to CBS Sports.

The comeback arrived alongside a wave of coverage crowning her, in the words of Forbes, “the world’s richest woman who has made her fortune primarily as an athlete,” a distinction built as much on her post-retirement business activity as on her playing record. That combination, an on-court legacy already secured and a still-active, headline-generating second act, has kept Williams a fixture of mainstream sports and business coverage well past the point most athletes fade from public view.

Williams left Puma for Nike in December 2003 on an eight-year deal reported at up to $55 million, a contract structured with royalties and performance bonuses tied to Grand Slam wins and world number one rankings, according to Chief Marketer. That relationship has been renewed repeatedly over more than two decades and remains her single most significant endorsement, running alongside a long list of other sponsors that has included Wilson Sporting Goods, Gatorade, Beats by Dre, and Michelob Ultra at various points in her career. Around her 2026 Wimbledon comeback, Forbes counted roughly ten active long-term sponsorship relationships, including Nike, Wilson, automaker Lincoln, watchmaker Audemars Piguet, meal-kit company Factor, Heineken, and telehealth company Ro, alongside speaking engagements that can individually command $1 million or more. Off-court endorsement income, separate from her $94.8 million in career prize money, has been estimated at more than $400 million over the course of her career.

Williams has built one of the more substantial business portfolios of any retired athlete, anchored by Serena Ventures, the venture capital firm she started informally in 2014 and turned into a formal institutional fund with a $111 million raise in 2022, according to Front Office Sports. The fund, which prioritizes founders from underrepresented backgrounds, has backed more than 90 companies and helped push at least 14 of them to unicorn status, valuations of $1 billion or more, with recent activity including a stake in digital health company Midi Health’s 2026 funding round. Williams also holds a minority ownership stake in the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, acquired alongside Venus in 2009 when the team was valued at roughly $1.1 billion, along with stakes in the National Women’s Soccer League’s Angel City FC, the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo, and the Unrivaled 3-on-3 basketball league. Beyond investing, she has launched her own operating businesses, including the vegan cosmetics line WYN Beauty in 2024, the fashion label S by Serena, and Nine Two Six Productions, a film and television venture through which she and Venus also co-host a podcast.

Williams’s confirmed real estate holdings include a roughly 10,433-square-foot waterfront estate in Jupiter, Florida, bought for $8 million around the start of 2021, an eight-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bathroom property that formerly belonged to former MLB catcher Yadier Molina and came with its own tennis and basketball courts, according to Tennis.com. She and husband Alexis Ohanian also maintain a separate family home in the Palm Beach area, redesigned with sister Venus’s interior design firm V Starr and featuring an art gallery, a hidden karaoke suite, and a wine cellar, but built deliberately without a tennis court so Williams could keep her home life separate from her career, according to Hello!. Beyond real estate, her largest asset by reported value is not a property at all but her sports ownership stakes, led by the Miami Dolphins interest that Forbes valued at roughly $7.5 billion for the full franchise in 2026, a minority position that nonetheless represents a significant and appreciating store of wealth well beyond her homes.