Ken Evenstad

In 1969, Ken Evenstad was a pharmacist in St. Paul who itched to do more than count pills. He bought the remnants of Upsher-Smith, a small heart-drug company started by his wife Grace's grandfather, and entered the generics industry. Acrimony grew in billionaire Ken Evenstad's family slowly, then ripped the family apart in the last years of his life. Evenstad, who died in late 2020, made a fortune by driving a small Minneapolis drug company in the 1970s into the then-nascent market for generic drugs. The firm — Upsher-Smith Laboratories, now in Maple Grove — became a significant player in generics and developed dozens of its own drugs. Evenstad also struggled to separate the family from Upsher-Smith — which had no other shareholders except himself, his wife Grace, their daughter Serene and son Mark. The family decided in 2016 to put Upsher-Smith up for sale. A year after the first and biggest transaction in that process took place, Serene filed suit against the rest of the family alleging they were trying to freeze her out. Lawyers representing Ken's estate, Grace, Mark and trust attorney Howard Rubin portrayed Serene as a selfish attention-seeker who should be happy with the approximately $200 million she has received since 2017. In 1989, Evenstad and wife Grace turned to another passion. They bought an estate in Oregon, started a vineyard and began to produce wine under the brand Domaine Serene, named after their daughter. Today, Domaine Serene is one of the nation's leading producers of pinot noir, and the Evenstads are recognized as leaders in the rise of Oregon's Willamette Valley region. In 2015, the couple purchased a 600-year-old Burgundy vineyard in France. The family found a buyer for the core generic assets of Upsher-Smith, striking a $1 billion deal with a Japanese company in early 2017. Serene reaped about $128 million in the transaction. The remaining Upsher-Smith assets were placed in a new holding company called Acova, with the share ownership still spread equally among the four family members and Mark in charge of finding buyers. That May, he told Serene if she didn't want to wait for the transaction processes to play out to propose terms for the company to buy out her stake.