On his father's death in 1982 he inherited 17.4% of BMW, the company his Father had saved from bankruptcy in 1959. Quandt also inherited from his Father substantial holdings in other companies, many of which he runs through his holding company, Delton AG. These include:

He was born in Bad Homburg to Herbert Quandt and Johanna Quandt. He attended the University of Karlsruhe where he studied engineering from 1987 to 1993.

From 1993–1994, he worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Munich. From 1994 to 1996 he worked for Datacard Group of Minneapolis as a marketing manager in Hong Kong.

In autumn 2005, he married Katharina, a software Engineer. They have a daughter, born on New Year's Eve that same year. He has been sighted watching football matches but otherwise keeps a low profile.

With his mother, he owned 18.3% of Gemplus International, a large digital security company, before its merger to form Gemalto in 2006. He currently serves BMW as a deputy chairman of the supervisory board. He also has held seats on the supervisory boards of Dresdner Bank AG and of the Gerling Konzern Allgemeine Versicherungs AG. Rumours predict he will eventually become head of BMW's supervisory board. His mother Johanna Quandt and sister Susanne Klatten are also substantial shareholders in BMW and other large German companies making them one of the wealthiest families in the world.

The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War. The family's Nazi past was not well known, but the documentary film revealed this to a wide audience and confronted the Quandts about the use of slave labourers in the family's factories during World War II. As a result, five days after the showing, four family members announced, on behalf of the entire Quandt family, their intention to fund a research project in which a Historian will examine the family's activities during Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. The independent 1,200-page study that was released in 2011 concluded: "The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis"-Joachim Scholtyseck, the Bonn Historian who compiled and researched the study. As of 2008 no compensation, apology or memorial at the site of one of their factories, have been permitted. BMW was not implicated in the report.