Ernest Garcia III studied management science and engineering at Stanford, graduating in 2005. He began as an associate at RBS Greenwich Capital and in 2007 joined DriveTime, the used-car retailer and lender led by his father, Ernest Garcia II.
In 2012 he co-founded Carvana with Ryan Keeton and Ben Huston, with initial funding from DriveTime. He has been chief executive from the start. The company let customers buy a used car entirely online, with delivery or pickup from a branded, car-sized vending machine, the first of which opened in Nashville in November 2015.
Carvana listed on the NYSE on 28 April 2017 at $15 a share. At the IPO the younger Garcia and his father together owned about 71 percent of the company. The father built DriveTime after buying the bankrupt rental franchise Ugly Duckling in 1991, and in 1990 had pleaded guilty to bank fraud linked to the Lincoln Savings collapse.
The family tie drew scrutiny in January 2025, when Hindenburg Research published a report on related-party dealings between Carvana and DriveTime. Carvana stock had already swung hard: Bloomberg estimated that Garcia's wealth fell 98 percent in 2022. The company reported revenue of about $20.3 billion and net income of about $1.41 billion in fiscal 2025.