Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, April 7th.

Today on Forbes, the founder of Chipotle is now a billionaire.

Steve Ells opened the first Chipotle in a former ice cream shop near the University of Denver

in 1993.

Now, three decades and a fast casual dining revolution later, he's the first ever burrito billionaire.

Forbes estimates that Ells, who was Chipotle's CEO until 2018, and its executive chairman until

2020, is worth $1 billion, making him one of 288 fresh faces on this year's world's billionaires list, which was released

last week. He might be the unlikeliest of all. Last year, 130,000 Chipotle employees

dished out $11.3 billion worth of chicken, steak, and barbacoa across 3,700 global stores,

enough to make Chipotle the third most valuable restaurant chain on the planet, with a market capitalization of $68 billion, behind only

McDonald's and Starbucks. Yet the 59-year-old L's, a classically trained chef more likely to discuss

the provenance of his ingredients than the

profitability of his stores, made a few personal moves that seemed all but sure to keep him off

the billionaire's list. Beginning in 1998, he sold huge pieces of Chipotle to McDonald's in exchange

for the fast food chain's help expanding Chipotle from 16 locations to nearly 500.

By the time the business went public in 2006, it was the Golden Arches, not founder and CEO

L's, that reaped most of the rewards.

McDonald's owned 91% of Chipotle, which rocketed beyond a $1 billion valuation on its first day of trading.

Ells owned less than 4%, a stake worth just $44 million at the time.

Then he quickly began offloading what little stock he had, and kept selling even as the price

shot through the roof over the next decade. By 2014, Chipotle's shares were up 1,400

from the IPO, yet Ells had whittled his stake down to 1%, prompting Forbes to declare

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