Who Owns EY (Ernst & Young)?

EY's roots reach to 1849, when Samuel Lowell Price's contemporary Frederick Whinney joined what became Whinney Smith & Whinney in London, a predecessor of Ernst & Whinney. On the American side, Arthur Young founded his Chicago accountancy practice in 1906, and the Ernst brothers, Alwin and Theodore, founded Ernst & Ernst in Cleveland in 1903.

Ernst & Ernst merged with Whinney's firm internationally in 1979 to form Ernst & Whinney. Arthur Young grew into one of the largest US firms, known for auditing oil, banking, and technology clients. In 1989, during the wave of consolidation that shrank the Big Eight, Ernst & Whinney merged with Arthur Young & Co. to create Ernst & Young, then the largest accounting firm in the world.

The firm shortened its public brand to EY in 2013, retaining Ernst & Young as the legal identity of member firms. Through the 1990s and 2000s it expanded consulting, then sold its consulting arm to Capgemini in 2000 after independence rules tightened, rebuilding advisory gradually afterward. The 2008 acquisition of the Monitor Group's strategy practice and the 2014 addition of The Parthenon Group produced EY-Parthenon, the firm's strategy consulting brand.

A proposed split of the firm, called Project Everest, would have separated audit from advisory into two businesses. Member firms rejected it in 2023 after more than a year of internal debate, and EY remained a single multidisciplinary network.

Recent years have been defined by AI investment and steady growth. The firm reports spending more than $1 billion annually on AI platforms, including EY.ai and the EY Fabric technology platform, and says AI-related revenue grew 30 percent in FY2025. Combined global revenue reached $53.2 billion for the year ended June 2025, up 4.0 percent in local currency.