#149 The Big Rich (Oil Billionaires)

Podcast: Founders
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 4260s
URL: https://afp-922710-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb/episodes/a9eb2e30-2023-4b5e-bbd7-323c6641033b/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=57933a1d-c5a9-4040-9aca-e766ae2ec0eb&awEpisodeId=a9eb2e30-2023-4b5e-bbd7-323c6641033b&feed=3hnxp7yk
Fetched: 2026-03-03 08:56:11

It's hard to tell people about Texas. It's hard to explain what it means to be a Texan, but if you grew up in Texas, as I did, it becomes a part of you, as if you're a member of a club. The myths about Texas die so hard, mostly because Texans love them. So much of it is wrapped up in oil. But the fact is, growing up in Central Texas during the 1970s, I never met an actual oil man. It wasn't until I was 16. The weekend I served as an escort at a debutant ball that I was introduced to the class of Texans, known as the Big Rich. They talked of boarding schools and weekends in Las Vegas and wine in Paris and jetting the London and my head just spun and spun and spun. Though I didn't realize it at the time, those were the years, the early and mid-1980s, when their era was ending. The fathers of those boys were going bankrupt. When my editor suggested some kind of book on Texas oil, I was surprised how quickly a structure sprang to my mind. It would be not about the oil industry per se, but about the great Texas oil families, the ones who generated all those myths, the hunts, the basses, the merchants, the colons. I thought of them as the Big Four, though it wasn't until I began my research that I found out that they had been called exactly that. This book is built on three years of research, during which I plunged into dozens of Texas and out-of-state archives, interviewed surviving members of the Big Four families, and read more than 200 books and thousands of newspapers and magazine articles. These and other histories served as a starting point to explore the rise and fall of the greatest Texas oil man, many of whom are fast being forgotten. There's never been anything lasting written about Houston's flamboyant Glenn McCarthy, though there should be. It's hard to find anyone under 60 who remembers a Texas legend so famous in his day that he adored the cover of Time magazine. There's even been less written about the secretive Sid Richardson, once the richest man in America. The joys of writing this book were multitude. There's nothing I love more than cruising the Texas back country. One morning, in 2005, I was in far west Texas. I entered a table-land whose view was so breathtaking I had to pull to the side. There, as far as the eye could see, were oil wells, hundreds, maybe thousands, a lost plateau filled not with dinosaurs, but with the steel and wire and sweat of American industry. One had been out there for years, I realized, mapping the land, drilling holes in the earth, returning home to Dallas and Houston and Fort Worth, with millions of dollars in their pockets. This was a Texas, an America I had never seen, and I suddenly needed to know what became of these men and their fortunes. Their stories, it turned out, were everything I had imagined and more. There is truth behind legend. There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires. Patriarchs of squabbling families who owned private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars and jousted with presidents and tried to corner an international marketer too. This is their story, told to the lives of the four Texas families and a few of their peers, who rose the highest and in some cases fell the hardest. Each of their patriarchs began an obscurity, and all, through a historic quirk of fate, laid the foundations of their fortunes in a single four-year span. In time, their days dissolved into a sored litany of debauchery, family feuds, scandals and murder, until collapsing in a tangle of bankruptcies. Some survived, others didn't, a few, count their millions to this day. That was an excerpt from one of the wildest books I have ever read. The book is called The Big Rich, The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes and is written by Brian Burrow. This was actually recommended to me by a listener, and I went to the page on Amazon, and this is what I read, the first sentence I read, and I immediately ordered it after I read the sentence. It says, this is the economist reviewing the book, and it says, what's not to enjoy about a book full of monstrous egos, unimaginable sums of money, and the punishment of greed and short-sightedness? Okay, so I have a ton of highlights and notes, so I'm going to jump right into it so we don't waste any time. I'm going to focus, there's a million interesting stories in this book. I'm going to focus on the four main founders, that's Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Merchison, and Sid Richardson. So before I get into the four main characters, I want to give you a little prehistory to the Texas oil industry. Most, there's a generation before our four main characters, there was another boom in Texas oil. So I want to read this part, because it's really, for me, it was really hard to comprehend one, the size of these early Texas oil wells, and then two, how the size and the quality are like thereof of that oil changed the world. So it says, Lucas had never seen anything like it, like it, no human had. The Lucas number one oil well changed the world forever. That first well produced at a greater rate than all other American oil wells in existence combined. In a matter of days, in fact, the pastures around the well would be producing more than the rest of the world's oil wells combined. Of those first six Texas oil wells, three produced at a higher rate than the entire country of Russia than the world's top producer. It's called Spindle Drop, where we're in Texas. Spindle Drop not only created the modern American oil industry, it changed the way the world used oil. Its dirty little secret was that the oil found there was such poor quality that it could not be refined into kerosene, and that's what changed everything. So much black crude flow that railroads and steamship companies, it was so cheap, they decided to convert from coal to oil. Other industries soon followed as did other countries, the British, American, and German Imperial navies. Everything that today runs on oil and its byproducts from automobiles, this is the most important section. So let me read this to you again, most important sentence rather. Everything that today runs on oils and its byproducts, from automobiles to jet fighters, to furnaces, barbecue grills, and lawn mowers, all of it began at Spindle Drop. So the author's giving us all this backstory, because in the first generation of Texas oil boom, there's a distinction that I think I need to tell you right from. So you have the independence, which are just like individual independent businessmen entrepreneurs that start drilling for oils, they usually call wildcatters, and then you have the majors. Magers are like Texaco, mobile, all these gigantic oil companies. So out of the first boom, the first generation of independent Texas oilmen, almost all of them go broke. And the author brings up somebody I talk about over and over again, which is Howard Hughes senior. And he says that after the only person that really emerged from the first oil boom extremely wealthy was Howard Hughes senior, and that's because in a gold rush, he was selling pickaxes. This is something you and I have talked about over and over again. I've said on the past podcast, including the one I did on Howard Hughes, that I really think we, somewhere along the lines, we messed up, we're celebrating the wrong person. So yes, Howard Hughes's life was interesting. On its own part, junior, that is, it's his dad's discovery, his invention, and the company he built that allowed his son to go off and pursue things in aviation and movies and all the other stuff. But Howard Hughes senior had to build, in my opinion, one of the most profitable companies that ever existed, and this is the author talking about that. So it says, what the spin-off drop boom provided was a classroom where the oil business could be learned. A few caught on quickly, among them was Howard Hughes, captivated by oil, this is Howard Hughes senior, obviously, captivated by oil, Hughes and his partner, this guy named Walter Sharp, began, began drilling wells, this is in Louisiana, frustrated by their drillers inability to penetrate solid rock, Hughes and Sharp developed a drill that could. That's his innovation that the cornerstone of the empire that he builds, right? Repanded it in 1908, and Hughes' rock bit became an industry standard. In time, the company he founded, Hughes' tool would make his son, the legendary Howard Hughes, junior, the wealthiest Texas oil man of all. So moving on, you have this huge bust, excuse me, you have this huge boom, that then you're going to have a bust, and I thought this was very interesting, and the main part of this section is like, what if one person could capture all the upside of these giant wells? So it says, the oil man who ran humble and magnolia, these are large, large oil companies of their day. He says, survive the lean years of the 1910s by dividing the risk in a very risky business. In doing so, so they spread the risk over, so not any one of them was going to take a loss, but the problem is, it's like you're also, if you have another boom, which they didn't think was going to happen at the time, they thought it was going to dwindle, then you don't capture all the upside. So it says, in doing so, they also divided the upside. No one in that first generation of Texas oil man, with the exception of Howard Hughes created anything like a true American fortune. Their success, however, raised a tantalizing question. What if there really was another spindle drop out there, and there is multiple times over all over the world, actually? And what if it was not discovered by a large company, but by a single Texan working alone? Unwell, one fortune. It was the stuff of myth, the El Dorado of Texas oil. And as a new decade dawn, a hoard of young second generation oil men would begin trying to find it. And that is the foundation of the story that takes place in this book. And that is going to lead us to the big four, all of whom are wild and crazy in their own way. Of all the thousands of men who swarmed into the muddy tent camps in those boisterous years after World War I, four would find the most. Two did it the old fashioned way, drilling holes deep on the earth. One did it with his mind, and the fourth did it with a fountain pen. If Texas oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it. A good old boy, a scold, a genius, a bigamist. Known in their heyday as the big four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America's wealthiest man. Okay, so the first of the big four is this guy named Roy Cullen. He's also older than the rest of the big four. His history has not been kind to Roy Cullen. A fifth grade dropout who in his heyday was probably America's richest man. Cullen grew up poor in San Antonio. He endured a difficult childhood, marked by family turmoil, financial reversals, and frequent fist fights. Cullen appears to have been a stubborn, prideful child. Qualities that would follow him into adulthood. A shame of the family's poverty, he clung to his mother's stories of his grandfather's Ezekiel Cullen's prominence. So as they were talking about theirs, the family lost a lot of wealth because they were on the wrong side. They picked the wrong side in the Civil War. Cullen says a lonely boy Cullen hung a blanket over his head at night and retreated inside with a lantern, maps, and dozens of books. Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlisle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Blackstone, and plenty of history. He day dreamed of traveling the world of owning his own business. His favorite dream was of the massive white plantation home that he would build someday. With portacos and gardens just like the beloved family plantation, the hated union men had burned. Someday he promised his mother they would live in it together. When Cullen was 12 years old, the money ran out. He dropped out of school to work 10 hours a day in a candy factory. It's kind of like Horseshoe, Milton Hershey, we talked about a few weeks ago, right? At 18, he knew enough about cotton to become a buyer. So the cotton buyer of time, it says it was a roving company representative who negotiated with farmers for the crops. You travel a little bit of the country, negotiate a price, and then buy that, and then you're going to resell it. Cullen did his business on horseback, almost dying at one point during a blizzard. Interesting enough. There's just one sentence that ties into the buyer of Sam Colt that I just told you about. Cullen strapped on a Colt revolver. If you listen to that podcast, you know that Texas was a, probably, no, it was the most important early market in the early days of Sam Colt's company. So back to Roy Cullen for seven years. Cullen made his way as an independent cotton broker, but he lost most of his savings in the financial panic of 1907. When he turned 30, Cullen was itching for a change. He set his sights on learning about real estate. So he's going to try to sell real estate. He does that for a few years, and it says the real estate business he noted years later was not exactly booming in Houston in those days. He stuck it out for four frustrating years before giving up and returning to the only business he knew trading cotton. So I just want to pause here. The reason I'm telling you all about this is because what I found most interesting about this part, he's 34, 35, something like that, years old, nothing, nothing in his life up until this point would indicate that this guy was going to become the richest American. And here's the event that got him going down that path. So he's walking to his office one day. He says he was brooding over his dismal prospects one day when a man named Jim Cheek stuck his head into the hall. Cheek was a real estate developer, and he was thinking about getting into oil. He asked if Cullen would come work for him, traveling the state to acquire lease rights. And this is what Cullen says. Cullen's like, I don't know anything about oil, Jim. I've never read an oil lease in my life. Cheek's offer though was attractive. All expenses paid, a solid salary, plus one quarter of anything they brought in. And this is what this is actually a smart move that Cullen does. That goes back to what he did when he was a child underneath his blanket. He first headed to the Houston Public Library, where in time he read every book he could find on the geology of oil. What he found was a mishmash of fairy tales and guesswork. Oil fields were thronged with characters who, this is just so many crazy sentences in this book, and this is one of them. Oil fields were thronged with characters who claimed to have special oil finding powers, creatures who swore they had x-ray eyes, and drifters who used psychic powers to direct drillers. Now, on hindsight, this obviously is going to sound extremely silly to us. But at the time, there were indeed companies, entrepreneurs, and others paying people that claimed to have psychic or some kind of supernatural power that they could find oil. And those people made money. They made money in short term because they realized it's pretty clear. If you tell me, hey, drill here, and there's nothing there, and you tell me, hey, drill here, and there's nothing there, and over and over again, and these people are full of shit. But at the time, they were able to make a living, which just sounds really silly to us. Now, one of the reasons I want to pick out some of a few more parts on Roy's, because really his story is one of perseverance, you know, he's struggling in a cotton industry for a while, and he's struggling in real estate, five years past, and he's in the oil industry with little, little luck. He's still working with Jim Cheek. He's eventually going to strike out on his own, but we're not there. He says this for the next five years, Colin Rome, West Texas, leasing oil rights everywhere he went, all the wells came up dry. What Colin got, though, was an education and a wealth of context in and around Houston. By 1920, his wife was making noises about how much he was traveling. Colin was almost 40 by then, and his five children barely knew him. So he's like, all right, I'm going to just come back home. I'm going to drill and try to build my own business based on what I learned. What I'm working with Jim, it's not really working out, which is how armed only with his library books and a reputation for hard work and honesty, Colin decided to drill a well on his own. And this is the first time in his life he's ever going to be successful. We're not there yet. First, he has to persevere through a lot of other failures. To Colin's irritation, the first well came up dry, as did the second and the third. His investors, he was acutely aware, were quickly losing their earlier profits. For months, Colin rose before dawn, kissed his wife goodbye, and drove down to Trump Damon's mound. This is the area of Texas where he's drilling. His eyes studying the scrub for anything that might suggest opening, so let me pause there. Geologist just at this time were realizing, hey, if you study what's on top of the land, it might be an indicator of what's beneath it. And so Colin is actually self-taught, and he's one of the first people to use that idea. He says, many nights, Colin didn't come home at all, grabbing sleep on the ground beside the drilling rig. When he did make it home, streaked with mud and sweat, his skin pimpled with insect bites, his wife would be waiting on the veranda, and they would walk up to stairs and silence. Let me get a shave in a bath, tomorrow is another day, he would tell her. But the day stretched into months, then into years, and every well came up dry. This is what I mean about him, but just the story of Roy Collins, just more and more hard work and more and more perseverance over and over again. Colin spent 36 months at Damon's mound, the most frustrating period of his life. Three years in hell, he called it. So this whole time he's struggling, it's not like the rest of his life, it's just standing still, his kids are growing up. His son had gone off to college. The two older girls were in high school, and now they had two more little girls to pay for. I feel like you can, when you read the sentence, you can really put yourself in his shoes at night, lying in bed, lily, that's his wife, wondered how long this could go on. We got to keep going a little longer, honey, Colin would say, I want the children taken care of tomorrow will be another day. So let me just pause there, Roy is definitely a, you know, a troubled person. He's got a lot of interesting ideas, so let me just tell you the things that, I thought were most valuable about his stories. The fact what I just covered, the fact that he's willing, he's willing not to give up, he's got an abundance of perseverance. What he just said about, hey, I'm working this hard, he's willing to work hard because he understands he needs to provide for his family. I think that's extremely admirable. But the next thing, the other two things I liked were the fact that he's extremely would not relinquish his independence, and he also realized that if you're doing the exact same thing everybody else does, like that, you're not going to get, you're just going to get the same results as everybody else does. And so he starts talking about this here, he says, listen, the trouble with this business is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface. If it was up near the top, there wouldn't be any trick to it. You've got to drill deep for oil. So over the next few pages, we really see his fundamental belief, and I think there's a metaphor, what's the note I left, there's a metaphor here, he's finding success where others have failed. So I'm going to read that to, let me finish this page first. So it says, colon hit the second gusher of his career. That man had guts, one investor said. If he thought there was oil under a track, he'd spend his last dollar drilling it regardless of what anyone thought. So that's another illustration of his independence, not only independence because he didn't, he wanted to be in control of his own destiny by running his own company, but independence of mind. But when he missed, it didn't phase him. Nothing ever discouraged him. So you add optimism and perseverance to that list as well. That second gusher, there's a lot going on this page, so hopefully I'm making sense to you. There's just a lot happening here. But that second gusher also, it becomes this mantra, this idea that you've got to drill deeper. And again, I think that's the metaphor that can be applied to so many different things. So it says the second gusher under new mantra for colon. Hit the flanks, skip over that part, and drill deeper. If he didn't find oil, drill deeper still. Many of the field hands, a number of whom would work with colon for the next 30 years, could imitate his laconic instructions in their sleep. Boys, let's go a little deeper. His long time operations manager said, when they start to lower Mr. Colon into his grave, I bet he'll sit up and say, boys, dig her a couple feet deeper. Another thing that's interesting that he's different from the big force, he gives away 93% of his fortune. I think before he dies, which when you find out what happens to some of the other fortunes that are left behind, that's probably the best thing you could do, because take Clint Merchus and Junior. We haven't got to his dad yet, but you might know that name because he's the founder of Dallas Cowboys. He's also an absolute moron, who to squanders the second biggest fortune in Texas family history. So if you think about it, Clint dies, leads this giant fortune to his son and his son, full of cocaine, just drinking, he's just an absolute idiot. And I think it's very helpful to read stories about people like that, because then it's that old Charlie Munger saying where he's like, hey, tell me, I want to know where I'm going to die and I'll just never go there. That aphorism of his same thing, I study Clint Merchus and Junior and be like, okay, just do the opposite of what that guy does, and you'll be fine in life. But we're not there yet, let me get down. So this idea that Roy Colon has, hey, drill deeper, drill deeper, what he's doing is, there would be all these fields that other people hit, they came up dry, he'd come in behind and just drill deeper, deeper, deeper, and realize those people quit too early. This is the metaphor here. There's just a lot of things that this idea can be applied to. But as his strategy gets out, there's other people that are not in the oil industry that want to get into the oil industry. So in Texas, I think it was lumber and I can't remember the other industry, but there's gigantic fortunes made, and so one of these guys that made a fortune in lumber is trying to go in and bankroll with Roy. And this is where Roy is just absolutely refusing to give up his independence. So this is going to, this is a little longer apart, let me put and read this to you. As Colon remembered the conversation 25 years later, West, that's a guy's name, said, I've got $3 million lying around and I've got the West Production Company, which doesn't amount to much. I'll put the $3 million in my oil company and give you one quarter interest if you'll go in with me. You'll be president and have complete charge of the company. Colon said he'd think it over. Remember, Colon's not, he's moderately successful, but he's not set for life by any means at this point. So this is what makes it so surprising about what he does here. The following Tuesday, having heard nothing from Colon, West Telephone him again. I made a proposition to you last Saturday and since then, I haven't heard a damn thing from you. I offered to give you almost a million dollars and you haven't taken the trouble to reply. What's your answer, Roy? Not interested, Colon said. For a moment, West was speechless. Not interested, he barked. My God, what do you want? Tell you what I do. Tell you what I'll do, Colon said. I'll go in the oil business with you. 50-50. For every dollar you put in, I'll put in a dollar. But only on condition that I have full charge. No interference from you. West went quiet for a moment. Roy he said after a moment. I didn't know you had that kind of money. He didn't. I'll put up $5,000, Colon said. And you put up $5,000. Well, each have half interest. West didn't understand. I offered you $3 million. And you get a quarter of that outright. You'll turn that down and put up $5,000 of your own money. That's right, Colon said. Then he went on. I won't be working for you. And I just love that story because that demonstrates his personality. It's just really unbelievable. And in this one sentence, this is the summary of what I kept mentioning. The fact that he's using a strategy different than other people. He's not just got. Most people are just lemming like, right? They're just going to, oh, this guy found oil. OK, let me go over there. I'll draw right next to him. Oh, and they'll do that over and over and over again. Until all of the profits are obviously whittled away. The metaphor here is he's finding success where others have failed. And I think that's such a key. OK, so now I want to introduce you to the second and third of the big four. They're going to be friends. They start working together. Eventually, they go several ways, even though they're lifelong friends. This is an intro to Clint Merchison and Sid Richardson. So Clint Merchison, he's arguably a genius, really smart. It's his son that I was just talking about that is an absolute moron. So this is Clint saddled with the body of a snowman. He had a giant head of bean bag nose and no neck to speak of. He had a listen to this. What a crazy sentence. He had a face like a dish of melted ice cream. But what Clint lacked in physical appeal, he made up with a mind that word, weird, word, I don't know how to pronounce that word, like a Swiss timepiece. Headstrong and independent, distainful of his father's stuff he weighs. Young Clint was Tom Sawyer with an abacus. So the benefit that they just referenced his father. His father, the benefit he had is his father was a local Texas banker. And so Clint, his, the way he's going to dominate is his understanding of the banking industry and then using the banking industry's desire for increased returns to pull out financing and using leverage to build his, his oil fortune. Okay. So we'll get there. While his brothers took jobs at the bank, teenage Clint was drawn to the excitement of livestock pens where roving traders wheeled and dealed for the best prices on cattle and horses. And the stuff is because he didn't think he was going to get into oil. He thought he was going to trade livestock. That's what he wanted to do with his life. He found the given take thrilling and as a teenager made extra money trading livestock. He was joined by an older boy named Sid Richardson. This is the third of the big four. Now, Sid's interesting because he never marries, never has any kids, right? All of their, so you have Roy, I'm going to move ahead in the story so you understand where their, their fortune set up, right? So Roy Cullen gives away 93% of his wealth where he's still alive. Clint leaves, he's the only one that diversifies out of oil. This is the big headed dish, face with the dish of melted ice cream guy. And he, he really meant fancy himself an oil man, he's, fancy himself more as a businessman and an investor, right? So he wins a diversifying makes all this other money with his mind by diversifying all the money he made in oil, right? So when he dies, he leaves his two sons, control of like 20 something companies, like banks and life insurance companies, all that kind of stuff, real estate, stuff like that construction. And that's, his, his boneheaded son, that's named after him, that starts to tell his cowboys, is the one that squanders that fortune. He goes through about, goes from having like a net worth of a $1.5 billion to negative net worth of like 500 million and then dies meekly. And then you have HL Hunt, who's, might be the craziest of all these characters, he leaves behind a gigantic fortune. His son also manages to go bankrupt and squander one of the greatest fortunes ever existed because he tries to corner the world's silver market. He's also an idiot. Try to corner the world's silver market, he does this on margin, wins the entire business and his family collapses, it's in the book, I'm not going to cover it, but it's a very fascinating story. So that leaves the final fourth fortune, right? Which is Sid Richardson, who is about to get into, he doesn't have any heirs of his own, leaves his, gives away a lot of his fortune, leaves a small amount to, I think he takes on a partner, this is nephew, it's, the last name is Bass. And so Sid's partner, I think his name is Perry Bass, when he passes on, he leaves that fortune to his, his kid. Sid Bass is the only smart one out of all the descendants in this book, which is crazy, because some of these guys like HL Hunt, he's going to have three separate families, he's a bigamist and he's got 15 kids, right? But Sid Bass takes a $50 million inheritance and turns it into $5 billion. And he's really, that, that was one of my favorite parts of the book, it's very interesting. I'm actually looking for a book on Sid Bass because again, I just think, first of all, what a weird experience to be left with that much money and not only squander but be hardworking and smart, it's very, very rare. So I'm going to focus again, this podcast is just one of the main four founders, but I wanted to tell you how they end up because I find that part so just so fascinating. Okay, so let's get into, he was joined by an older boy named Sid Richardson, Clint and Sid established a lifelong friendship during impromptu cattle buying Johnson into Louisiana, where they purchased cows, they sold for meager profits, so they got the side hustle going on and trying to make money on the side and they both do it by selling cattle. This is now on Sid's, chafing at the classroom structure, no, this is Clint actually, chafing at the classroom structure, Clint took to organizing crap games. When school officials found out, Clint found himself on the first train back to Athens, that's Texas, downcast, he reluctantly took a job at the bank, a natural with numbers, he could add, subtract and multiply large sums in his head while other, while other tellers had to do it on paper, but he found life in a teller cage just at a cage. He complained he could make more money in a week trading cattle than he made at the bank in a month, so he's unhappy early 20s, he's like, I don't want to do this, I feel like I'm smarter, I can make more money with my brain and he was really, really smart guy. So he says he was 23 by then, eager to tackle the world and certain of his plan. He was heading to Fort Worth to work with a young oil man who had, who had bombarded him with letters of the money to be made in North Texas. This was his old friend, Sid Richardson. For a man who would one day be proclaimed America's richest citizen, who at his death controlled more petroleum reserves than three major oil companies, Sid Richardson left few footprints on history. He attracted no biographer. A lifelong bachelor who lived before the age of prying reporters, Richardson disdained letter writing, preferring to use the telephone. This sentence is almost unbelievable too. In protégé, the advantage of one of his protégé was the evangelist Billy Graham. One said, Sid Richardson told me years ago, don't put anything in writing. So once again, we see this idea. I talked about it on the, when I just read the autobiography rock filler, when you study a lot of these, uh, these entrepreneurs in the past, they put a priority on silence. Just to shut your mouth, don't tell everybody what you're doing, you're going to give away your advantage. It's very hard to compete with somebody you don't even know exists. I think that's a very interesting idea. Sid came from humble beginnings. That much is sure. Richardson was one of seven children. Three of his siblings died before the age of seven. Richardson, unlike his friend Clint, was not exactly a go-getter. When he was 16, he took a dollar day after school job at a cotton compress and he was fired for being lazy. And it's during his childhood, he actually, he discovers the love for trading things from his father. And this is a very important lesson that he keeps with him for his whole life. It's also part of why he was also silent. He was a little bit paranoid. He says, Daddy taught me a hard lesson with that first trade, but he started me trading for life. So they're trading horses, excuse me, horses at the time. Sid worked all summer creating peaches to raise the money to buy the horse from his father, right? But once he purchased the horse, he discovered the horse was blind. Daddy, you cheated me, he's claimed. I did not, his father said. People will try to get at you any way they can. You might as well learn that now. So Sid, not the smartest person around, not definitely a little bit lazy, he takes a bunch of different jobs and he kind of stumbles into the oil industry somewhat by accident. He began, I'm just going to list some of the jobs he had. He began as a laborer, hauling pipe by day and apprenticing on Derek floors at night. He was hired as an office boy for an oil well supply company. And he was hired as an oil scout. So scouts, this is also interesting, scouts are the oil industry's spies. They spend their days driving from well to well, checking production trends, gauging competitors, strategies, and picking up rumors. It was a little bit of early oil corporate espionage going on. Scouting was good money. And Richardson entered the town square at the wheel of a new Cadillac. He's coming back to town because he owes Clint's father money. He tried to lend him like, I think $6,000 or something like that to trade Cadillac only lost all the money. So he used scouting as a way to pay him back. He says, a swung back around that dusty square twice. So all the bench warmers could see me good. And then I marched into the bank and I paid Mr. Munchenson his money and cash. Then I drove out of town again. Before the dust settled, all those old boys got off their benches and started for the oil fields. They said, if that dunce can make so much money, we'll go to. So at the beginning, in the early days of their oil careers, Clint and Sid worked together. What's weird is they never explain why they broke up and have very different paths. But they do wind up being lifelong friends. I love it. I love some of these stories in the book because they're in their sixties at the time. And every morning, they get up at like five in the morning. And the first thing they do is grab a cigarette, a coffee, and then they call each other and they talk for about an hour. Even though they're not doing business, this is very, very interesting. Clint went to work buying new leases. It was then he began to, remember, this is the big-headed, dish-faced guy. The guy said that was smart, that his son's an idiot. It was then he began to display his true genius. For the first time, he actually began drilling his own oil wells. Chronically short of cash, he would trade a share in one lease for a rig to drill in another. Once he got the rig, he would trade shares in its production for another rig and so on and so on. So he's a trader at heart. You can see how he approaches everything. He called it financing by finagling. Unlike older oil men, Murchison put his faith in science. One of the first men he ever hired was a talented geologist. By then, Murchison was no longer working with Richardson, exactly why I had never been explained. And it's interesting because they break up around this time and Murchison said, winds up being, he tries to drill for oil himself. Again, he's another person that perseveres and he fails over and over again. And while his friend Clint is succeeding, and I think Clint winds up loaning money so he's going to go bankrupt at this time. But at this point in the story, Richardson says it's all but broke, okay? Clint, I'm going to, I need to stick to their names. I got to stop switching. So I'm going to call him by their first names. Sid is all but broke. Clint meanwhile remained in North Texas and thrived. He partnered with a local wild catter. These are these independent people, like these oil spectators, spectators, speculators. And through their early 1920s, they hit strike after strike. Their partnership grew prosperous. And so this is going to go into a little bit more about the different trajectories of Clint and Sid. Clint, when he turned 30, Clint was already a wealthy man. So he winds up working with this other guy for a while and then he just got enough money. So he's like, all right, that's it. I'm going to run my own show. So it says Clint dissolved the partnership. He took his proceeds and estimated $5 million, which is an insane amount of money in 1925 and moved Anne, that's his wife, and the boys, to cosmopolitan San Antonio. He wanted a settled life, one where he could work finite hours in a clean office and make it home in time for dinner. That was not normal for the early oil industry as we just went over with Roy, who he was waking up before the sun comes up, sometimes sleeping at the oil rig. Very different life. Clint's like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to make money with my mind before that happens. So a tragedy strikes. The easy life he envisioned in San Antonio, however, was not to be. His wife noticed faint brown spots on her skin. Doctors diagnosed yellow jaundice. So a year after he, quote unquote, retires to office life, his wife dies. She enters a hospital and died in May 1926. Clint was stricken. He left the children in the care of relatives and disappeared, driving around the state alone, a whiskey bottle usually at his side, will remain of his business began to decay. And then, and died, Clint said, people said, I stayed drunk for a year. So he's in mourning. He's drunk all the time. I mean, all these guys are normally drunk all the time. But eventually, he goes back to work. And so I'm going to fast forward to that part. Now the company that he's going to set up, he does something really interesting because they were just looking for oil. And a lot of when you're drilling for oil, a lot of natural gas, it just escapes into the atmosphere. And they didn't realize the value of it. Clint realized it. So the company he's going to start, let me read my note, is going to supply natural gas, drill for oil. He uses that money to buy life insurance companies, banks, publishing companies, railroads, industrial building material companies, and so on and so on. So now this is the beginning of the family business that he builds of incredible wealth. So he's going to leave to his two idiot sons, okay? Says Clint had a thought. Why not offer gas heating and light to the locals? He already had the pipe. It was just the pipeline. And it only took a matter of weeks to lay it down on one side of the street. Residents were invited to tap into it anywhere they could. So again, he's discovering the point of this section I'm reading to you is there's all this value that people are just ignoring. And we see this over and over again to history. So Clint's like, this is stupid, why am I, this is valuable, people will pay for it. And he's going to set up and he's going to get this ongoing, it's almost like a mini utility company, right? Residents were invited to tap into it anywhere they could. $5 a month for a home, $10 for a business. Natural gas had been used to heat Texas homes and factories in England for a century. But it never caught on in the United States. Most Texas oilmen simply allowed the gas they found to escape into the atmosphere. Clint was amazed how simple the business was. Once the pipeline was built, all he did was sit back and collect monthly checks. And he talks about this next sentence he's going to talk about the difference between the mind of Clint and all these others. All the big four, all his other, his other peers. Clint had big plans for Southern Union, that's the name of his company. The kind that occurred to few, if any, of his peers and Texas oil, the value of thinking differently than those around you. So he goes out and he starts expanding this natural gas pipeline business that he's got. He extend, he wants to expand out of Texas and he goes and does this auction in Albuquerque. And this is also something fundamental to understand about. Clint is, he carved out into advantage because he understood banking, remember that his family was in banking, better than any other oilmen. They didn't understand that and they gave him a massive advantage. He might be the most interesting of the big four. HL Hunt is by far the craziest, but I don't know, I like the way Clint thought. It half doesn't competitor spring up to bid against him. The mayor who's doing conducting this bid in Santa Fe, no, is Albuquerque, Albuquerque. The mayor asked whether any bidder could supply, or any bidder, any bidder could supply a cash bond to ensure its financial viability. He eventually, they want to have a bond of $100,000 to make sure, hey, if I give this contract, I want to make sure you're not going out of business. So all these people are bidding, the only person that raises their hand when it gets to $100,000 was Clint. And this is why this is so interesting. So he's walking out with this other guy that he's working with. And he says, as they walked outside, Cain shot him a glance. We don't have that kind of money in the bank, he said, we'll worry about that when we get back, Clint said. Clint operated this way for the rest of his life. As the son of a banker, he knew he could always find a gullible loan officer somewhere. One meeting was all Clint needed to get the $100,000. And this is what Clint said. Some people might be like, I don't want to go to a bank. What if they say no, Clint's from the other side is like, that's their business. They want to give, just like you want a loan, they want to give it to you. And so he summarizes that here. He says, listen, if you are honest and you are trying, your creditors will play ball. He coaxed every last dollar he could out of the Dallas banks, then pushed back the repayment, all but daring the bankers to foreclose. Now this is a, you got to, this is a little crazy for, because he's highly leveraged. So he says, by 1932, his debt had grown to more than $4 million, far more than his net worth. Aren't you, in this goes back to his understanding of the banking industry, though, that maybe he, he had a knowledge that other people didn't, right? He says, aren't you concerned about owning all this money that you can't pay? Somebody asked him, no, Clint said with a smile. If you're going to owe money, owe more than you can pay, then the people can't afford to foreclose. Okay, Sid eventually does better. He winds up hitting at 30, it takes him till he's 37 years old, but at 37 years old, he becomes an independent, successful oil man. He's going to build on that. I'm going to move because I got to, I got to introduce you to the fourth of the big four. And this is the craziest one. Might also be the richest one. HL Hunt, he was a strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind, a self-educated thinker who was convinced, absolutely convinced that he was possessed of talents that boarded on superhuman. That is not hypervely. You could compare him. He thought he was like the second coming of Jesus Christ, not in the literal sense, but he just thought he was a superhuman. He was a god. That's why he was a bigamist. He had secret families, three wives. They wound up finding out about each other later, but they didn't know about each other at the time. 15 kids. And he did that because he thought his genes were so great that they should be spread throughout the world. This is an insane, insane character. He may have been right. In the annals of American commerce, there has never been anyone quite like HL Hunt. At a time when Interant Wildcatters, like Sid Richardson, couldn't find time for a wife, let alone a family, Hunt would build three, two in secret. If they made a movie of his life, no one would believe it was true. The man who came to embody all the myths of the Texas oil man was neither raised in Texas, nor introduced to oil well after his 30th birthday. He was barely walking when his parents realized his intelligence bordered on that of a prodigy. His sibling swore he could read newspapers aloud at the age of three. His capacity for mathematics became a local legend. People marveled how the child could multiply large sums in his head. He winds up building his first fortune, like a small fortune, as a gambler. In fact, there's a rumor that he was down to his last $100 in the oil business, and he winds up going on a gambling spree and turns a hundred into a hundred thousand and saves his company. So it does seem to appear that he was gifted with a beautiful mind for lack of, I mean, he's got some very peculiar, very peculiar, that manifests itself very peculiar later in life, but he does seem to have a brain in there. Hunt recounted with odd pride in later years that his mom breastfeeding him until he was seven. I don't even know what to say about this guy. Hunt had a keen sense of entitlement, a feeling that he possessed a unique intellect, exponentially more insightful than anyone he met, and he means this, and this too became a lifelong trait. He runs up leaving home at a young age, he yearned to see the world. 16-year-old H.L. Hunt ran away from home. He worked as a laborer, a dishwasher. I'm just going to list all these weird jobs he had. He cut sugarbeats. He was a sheep herder. He was driving mule mules, planting cattle feed, lumberjacking, and he tried out for a semi-pro baseball team. In the days after his father's funeral, Hunt finally confronted his future, he was 22 at that point. He couldn't sit still for college and farm life bored him. In time, he made as much gambling as he did from the cotton fields. Now in his mid-20s, Hunt had grown to be a serious, solitary young man, quiet, focused, and disciplined. He keeps those traits for his whole life too. I think he has some kind of stroke. I can't remember what happens to him, but later on, up until he's like 85 years old, he just drove himself in a normal car with his brown bag lunch every day to the office and just thoughtfully went about his business. Even though inside, he's a crazy person and he's siring all these children and having all these hidden families. It's wild. He developed a reputation for honesty. Hunt's fortunes continued to rise and fall in cotton prices and his poker winnings. For the first time, Hunt began to question his style of living. He turned 32 that year. He wasn't a kid anymore. Oil had been, now he's finding out that there's a second boom in oil happening in Texas. Oil had been found. It sounded exciting. Far more exciting than another year of praying for cotton and land prices to rebound. This is interesting because we get an insight into his inner monologue, which I was so I'm fascinating in these stories. What is it that you're trying to do? He asked himself. I remember he's 32. Are you going to bury yourself here for the remainder of your life? Why not rent out the land and try something new? That's that inner monologue that I mentioned leads him into the oil business. He goes into the oil business. He finances that through his gambling winnings. That's the rumor I told you about earlier. I think he also got some loans as well but says there's just a series of ups and downs and then eventually he's going to be on solid ground. This is actually happening. I was wrong. It's not in Texas yet. He doesn't go to Texas first. He has his first oil success in Arkansas. So it says in three short years, Hunt had transformed himself from a gentleman planter into a professional gambler and then finally at the age of 35, a successful oil man. He controlled nearly 400,000 barrels of proven oil reserves, about $7 million dollars into days dollars. During the day, he was busy in the oil fields and at night, he was playing poker. So he's married. This is his first family. He's got a bunch of kids. Unfortunately, one of his kids dies and this is where he runs away from his life again. Weeks after his daughter's death, it was Hunt who underwent the most profound change. Maybe it was the grief. Maybe it was at the age of 35, an early midnight crisis. Maybe it had been his plan all along. Whatever it was, Hunt decided he had no interest in living out his days, a country oil man in Arkansas. He suddenly sold all his holdings for a $600,000 promissory note and then had the bank discounted for cash. He takes off to Florida looking for another wife though. We never find out why. He never explains his actions, why he did this. So he goes on on to Florida, meets a much younger woman, gives her like a fake name and everything else. That has his fake marriage ceremony. They start having kids. He settles her way far from his other family and then eventually he's going to move to Texas with his first family and then just goes back and forth between the two families and then eventually starts the third family. So he's trying to figure out where he's going to set up in Texas. This guy named Dad Joyner, who he's going to accidentally discover the East Texas oil field, which ones are being, I think maybe the largest one in Texas history. HL was going to buy it from him. This is a very complicated thing that has happened first. Let me just read this section. This is the most important revelation of his entire career because this is where he's going to build his fortune. The first, the foundation of his fortune, okay? So this is the people of Russ County where Dad Joyner discovered as well, went to bed at night, convinced they were sleeping atop an ocean of oil. So they hit but it's inconsistent. Usually if you have a large oil field, it'll produce, let's say, $2,500, whatever the number is. I'm just going to throw a number out there. $5,000 barrels a day. It'll do that relatively consistently, consistently and that's how you know how large it is. This one was inconsistent. It hit like 6,800 barrels and then would drop down. So the wildcatters are like, oh, maybe something's here. The large oil companies installed this before and they're like, no, that's a tail, tail sign that it's inconsistent. That's not as large as you think it is. Hunt disagreed, okay? So it says they were convinced they were sleeping atop an ocean of oil. The professionals, however, weren't so sure. Within days, many scouts were dismissing it as a freak and that's a terminology in the oil industry. It's a frid. This is that up and down oil while we're just talking about. Not HL Hunt. Great fort, this is such a great sentence. Great fortunes are built on great convictions. And from the moment he watched Joyner's drill test, Hunt was certain that this was a giant field. It got Hunt to thinking. The more he studied the land, the more he became convinced that the field stretched north and west of Joyner's wells. On the 4,000 acres, Joyner had already had already leased. An idea began to form. Maybe Hunt used to play wasn't to drill near the Joyner leases, which is what everybody's doing. It was to buy the Joyner leases. His opportunity to he sense lay in the old wildcatters legal troubles. Already his investors were being ensued. This is what I meant about being complicated. Joyner had most of these wildcatters don't have a lot of money. They would go out and speculate. They drill. If they hit, they immediately sell like let's say 50% or 75% interest to a major oil company. The major oil companies are using these people like individuals as think of it as a laboratory. You go out and you run all these experiments. Most of the experiments are going to fail. The ones that hit come back and will pay. It's almost like an outsourced research and development army. If you think about it that way. Joyner, what he did is because he didn't have any money, you could sell like individual leases. Maybe you have one acre and say maybe you have 4,000 acres. You sell leases on individual basis like maybe an acre, 10 acres, whatever the size is. You say okay, for X amount, you can come in at a percentage. Sometimes you'd have 20 investors all with 5% each as an example. But what Joyner was doing, he was committing fraud. He would resell the same lease over and over again. Then what happens is when some of his small oil fields came back, the people that had claims on it said, oh yeah, good, I'm going to make money now. And then they realized, oh wait, you sold to me, you sold to this guy and that guy and her cousin and all these other people. So he's going to wind up getting sued. And so the play that HL makes is hey, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to buy, I'm going to give you a lot of money upfront. And you're going to get money on what I make on the back end and I'll take care of your legal troubles because those legal troubles could bury you and you might lose all this your lease in these lawsuits anyways. So you could potentially lose everything. You might as well take my offer. And so I'm just skipping over all of this. I'm going to give you the main point here. Okay. News of the historic deal broke on the front pages of the Dallas papers. The men of Texas oil were left speechless. It was the most astounding business deal the state had ever seen. As the enormity of the East Texas field became apparent in coming months, it would be hailed as the deal of the century. This is why most people think HL home was the richest of all these guys. On obscure interloper, a closet bigamist, a man just nine years removed from life as a professional gambler and from Arkansas of all places had seized the heart of the greatest oil field in history. This is oh my god, this is going to blow your mind. A field that in the next 50 years would produce four billion barrels of oil. So now he does a deal of century, but he does something really smart. He realizes this is the opportunity of a lifetime. You got to go all in. There is not there's not another opportunity coming later. That's going to be bigger than this. So it says he drilled wells like a madman. He worked from dawn to late in the evening, seven days a week. Every cent he took in. Another smart move here from oil sales from the new the new loans. He got occasionally from selling part of the lease. He plowed back into the search for more oil. He also closed all his existing businesses and elderado and tree points is like I'm not there's not going to be opportunity better than this. I'm going to focus all of my attention on the greatest oil field in Texas history. And it says and though not everyone realized it at the time hunt himself was fast on his way to becoming not only the wealth. It's Texan of all time, but the richest man in the world. There's a quote I was researching HL Hunt outside of the book and I came across this quote from Jay Paul Getty, also another oil man. And he says in terms of extraordinary independent wealth, there's only one man HL Hunt. So the book goes on and on about the political influence that the big four had. They did not like government intervention. There's also all kinds of crazy stories. There's corruption in here between the big four and Lyndon Johnson FDR. They wind up buying a radio station for FDR Sun to run. So it's just amazing how much we see now, you know, decades after the fact and how corrupt all these politicians were and how they would do the bidding of, you know, these these four oil men, if you put them together, it's almost like they had the GDP of a small country. But the reason I bring that up is because part of what fueled them is that there was only regulations happening because they you'd have large companies. It's like a form of regulatory capture, right? So you have the large companies petitioning lawmakers to say, hey, limit how much these independent guys can drill. They do it. They cloak their arguments and hey, if you drill too much, it could make the land underneath unstable. It could cause the the prices to crash, et cetera, et cetera. If you're interested in obviously read the book, there's tons of it in there. But what I found most interesting is that Clint, think of like what's happening is he would refuse to adhere to these new laws. It's very similar to when I've covered several of the founders during the prohibition era, right? They think of hot oil, what I'm talking about is known as hot oil. Hot oil is drilling and transporting more oil than you're allowed to. And so it's just like, you know, bootlegers running alcohol from Canada into the United States. You weren't allowed to do that either. Clint said to hell with you guys, I'm not going to like I think that's on American. I think it's impeding my liberty. And so he was reported to be the largest company in distributing hot oil, which again, he had the legal right these are his oil fields. He just it he was producing more oil than technically he was allowed to. It all ties together because these are not normal people when they had a law. It's not like you are I guess that law is like, no, they're like, okay, I'll just go buy the politician or I'll go find the person that's in charge of that Senate committee and I'll donate to his, you know, his wife's charity. What, you know, all the different ways that it's bribing. Let's call it what it is, but they just find ways around it so they can legally bribe these people. Like, you know, hey, oh, your son FDR wants $25,000 or $50,000 for his company. Okay, I'll give it to him. Oh, and oh, it's just it's just a coincidence later that year that now I don't have to worry about this investigation with the IRS or this regulator has been changed out or whatever the case is. And it's interesting because even FDR's son in his autobiography, which the author of this book, Brian Burrow, talks about that later in life, he stops being friends with these oil guys because he realized I was just he says something like in his autobiography, I was just their pawn to get to my father. Alright, so let's go into the hot oil thing. It's called pro ration, but pro ration loomed as the real killer. The only way for Clint to offset his mounting losses was to pump more oil, but the federal government was now saying that that was against the law. Clint was apoplectic. This is un-American. He told anyone who would listen. It was all scheme devised by the majors to squeeze the independence out of East Texas. As one of his peers put it, it's my oil and if I want to drink it, it's none of your damn business. It was this line of thinking that led Clint to become an outlaw, a defiant hot oiler. He may have been the biggest hot oiler in all of East Texas, and he didn't especially care care who knew. He even renamed his partnership American Liberty because he said it represented freedom against regulatory tyranny. The new company would soon become Clint's largest. Running hot oil was a cat and mouse game. Federal inspect this is why this part, this paragraph reminds me a lot of what I read on prohibition. It sounds almost exact same thing except you're swapping out oil for alcohol, right? Running hot oil was a cat and mouse game. Federal inspectors, railroad commission agents, and Texas rangers were everywhere. Lookouts had to be posted. Most hot oil was pumped and refined late at night. When federal agents were in the area, decory caravans were sometimes used, and many inspectors could be bought off with bribes. And what I referenced in the introduction is the foundations of all these great fortunes happen in a very, very quick time. You're talking about four or five-year period. It says the day the East Texas oil field, the day that the East Texas oil field, they were wealthy oilmen in the state, but there were no true oil fortunes. It was East Texas and other fields discovered during a single five-year window, 1930, it was crazy. This is happening during the Great Depression, right? 1930 to 1935, that created the state's great family fortunes. The magnitude of wealth initiated in those 60 months would not become apparent for years and remains under appreciated today. In fact, the spigot of cash Texas oil opened in the early 1930s ranks among the greatest periods of wealth generated in American history. I already referenced this, but I'll read it to you, which is how Sid Richardson barely two years out of poverty found himself bankrolling the president's son in the radio business. This is FDR son. This is July 1938. This has actually happened. A year after President Roosevelt's visit, Richardson loaned Elliot, that's FDR son, $25,000, which Elliot used to buy a Fort Worth radio station. So Clint, Sid and Clint spent days fishing and barbecuing with FDR and his son. That's how they got to know him. Soon thereafter, Clint got out of a hot oil indictment by paying a nominal fine. So they build their foundation of their wealth in the 1930s. World War II makes their wealth go skyrocket. Look at the demand. I'm going to read you a couple of paragraphs here because this just blew my mind. I just thought it was interesting even by itself. So this is the demand for oil that World War II caused. So it says, a single destroyer burned an average of 3,000 gallons of oil every hour. One tank required 10,000 gallons of gasoline to drive 100 miles. That's insane. 10,000 gallons of gasoline to drive 100 miles. A single four-engine bomber used up to 400 gallons of high octane jet fuel per hour. And I mentioned earlier how it's hard for us to wrap our minds around some of the size of their discoveries, especially because it was owned essentially by one person, right? So just to get an example of that. Between 1941 and 1945, the Axis powers, something about all the countries that are containing the Axis powers, produced an estimated 276 million barrels. So Axis power 276 million barrels. The same time span. So all those countries could make 276 million barrels of oil. Texas produced 500 million from Texas alone. One state in America produced double the amount of oil as all the Axis powers combined. You want to go even crazier here. Remember H.L. Hunt? Why? I think he was the richest. That same time period. His oilfield produced 100 million out of the 500 million. The Axis powers did 276 and Hunt by himself did 100 million. That's insane. I mentioned how crazy an egotistical H.L. Hunt was. I want to elaborate on all the resulting attention. The bags of mail, the interview requests seemed to confirm what Hunt had long believed that he was a unique intellect, a superman, a figure whose ideas could save the nation from the mounting perils of communism. More than one of his aides sensed a new messianic quality and hunt. One of them said he thought he was the second Jesus Christ. So before I go to the end of the lives of the Big Four, I want to tell you there's so much more of this book. Maybe the last 25% is all about what the next generations do, but I just want to I want to, well, let me just read the census to you. This is the difference between the second generations of Clint and Sid. Remember they were lifelong friends, right? Now Big Clint's son, this is the guy, I think I've called him an idiot, like five times on the podcast. Now Big Clint's son, Slouch in his wheelchair, fully aware that Sid Bass, which is the second generation of Sid Richardson, right? So now Big Clint's son, Slouch in his wheelchair, fully aware that Sid Bass and his brothers had since achieved everything he hadn't. That while the basses were investing in Wall Street stocks and high tech startups, he had been snorting cocaine. So he's going to take a couple great trades that Sid Bass and he's working with this guy. He hired the last name of Rainwater. I'm going to look for books on their company because that was so interesting. And a good year, the Yates produced 25 million barrels plus natural gas with oil prices at $30 a barrel. That meant the field was generating 750 million revenues a year. So what they're talking about is they realized at this time, I don't know what year it is, unfortunately. They talk about T-Boon Pickens is also somebody that realized the same thing that Sid Bass did that eventually the stock market was so depressed that you could buy the best way to buy oil is not by drilling for more, but by buying a company that was undervalued because you could buy the company for less than their oil was actually worth. So this is an example of that. It says in a good year, the Yates produced 25 million barrels of natural gas, oil prices at $30 a barrel. That meant the field was generating 750 million in revenues a year. Sid did the math. The value of its stock was barely 3.8 billion. That's absurd. They began buying Marathon's company that going after a stock. Okay, so now we're in 1981. There you go. They began buying Marathon's stock in early 1981. Bass and Rainwater had accumulated just over 5% of Marathon shares at a cost of 148 million. Marathon executives fearing a hostile takeover panicked and a month later they sold out to US Steel. Bass and Rainwater walked away with 160 million in profit. So again, everybody else failed to continue to be good stewards of the wealth left to them besides the descendants of Sid Richardson and the bass families. I think this guy still alive actually is the only smart ones I would consider. They did this with Texaco too. They went up buying a bunch of stock and Texaco. They ended up selling it back to the company at a profit of over $400 million. This whole section on Sid and the basses is just trade after trade after trade like this. The other guys buying football teams just snore and coke and never did anything of subsistence life. He does do one smart thing. He winds up getting one of the largest oil fields in Libya and then like two years later, Gaddafi takes away from him and nationalizes unfortunately. But again, that was one good decision and a thousand bad ones. All right, so let me go back to the basses. So they wind up selling it back to the company at a profit of $400 million. What he does next is really interesting. They decided to put that money into Walt Disney. Disney, he swore was neglected gem. The stock was stuck in the $55 range. They thought that they could double prices at, they thought they were undervaluing like the media library, content library of Disney and then that their theme parks were neglect. And they actually wind up being some of the people that push Disney to hire Eisner. Actually, it was interesting. By the early 1990s, the basses $500 million stake in Disney would be worth a staggering $2.8 billion. It was Sid's crowning achievement in a span of just 16 years. In one of the greatest investment performances of the 20th century, he and Rainwater had increased the bass family fortune from $50 million to an estimated $5 billion. So let me get to the end of the lives of the big four. Nothing marked the end of the golden age. So much is the dimming of the men who had created it. So what they're talking about there is Texas oil dominates for a few decades and eventually you have rising in the Middle East and African other places and eventually they can produce oil cheaper than Texas than Texans could. And so that's why Clint saw so far ahead. He's like, I got to diversify out of the oil industry. That's when he's buying up railroads, insurance companies, everything else. So it says golden age is so much as dimming of the men who had created it. The original big four. Oh, man, Clint was the first to retreat. In his budget, he'd wake up every morning in his pajamas in his pajamas and a cigarette in one hand and a couple of copying the other. He began each morning around five in the morning with a call to Sid Richardson. What's the dope? We're usually Clint's first words and the two would spend an hour discussing everything from investments to their peach crops. See, I just think that's really cool. They were on a business partner. I went at being lifelong friends. They were going to same industry. And again, I think when when you read autobiographies of people right before they die, Rockefellers, the one, the most recent addition to that, they all hang on this. The importance of friendship. It's your enjoyment later in life. Don't neglect your relationships just for your business. Clues with your family, your friends and everybody else. Like, we're social creatures. Even if you only have a handful of them, you know, they make your life a lot better. And I think that like we would be wise to heed the advice from these wise old men. After another series of strokes, Clint was relegated to a wheelchair. He finally died in pneumonia in June 1969. The New York Times ran an obituary on page one, terming Clint a one man conglomerate. His entire life was devoted to making money. The New York Times wrote, but that wasn't really true. Clint had torn through his life with a gusto and those he left behind were uniformly thankful to have known him. Now we get to Sid. Sid's routine rarely varied. He arose around five and spoke to Clint. He talked and inevitably began with one saying that he had been awake for hours, waiting for the other to get up. That's hilarious. I just picture like two old men saying that to each other. His health was failing. He had high blood pressure. The doctors told him to quit drinking. They made him stop smoking. On September 30th, 1959, Richardson flew down to a pair of ranches that he owned and had purchased near San Antonio. The next morning, a servant found him dead in his upstairs bed. He had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. He was 68. Back to Roy. Roy Colin spent his last years paying more attention to his growing crop of grandchildren than politics or oil. This is the guy that donated I think 93% of his fortune. I think it before he died too. His time had passed and he knew it. In their 70s now, he and Lilly spent more time. Remember, Lilly's the wife back when he was 35, poor. They're laying in bed. He's like, just give me one more day. I'm going to provide for the family. Tomorrow will be another day and she's stuck with them and the loyalty was obviously rewarded. He and Lilly spent more time at their ranch. They were played cards and dominoes on the back porch and they would drive out a dust to watch their deer. They built homes for their daughters and their husbands. Most of their brood had taken their plane to a golf coast beach vacation in February 1957 when they got the call. Gampa, that's what they called him, had suffered a stroke in his sleep. He lingered on for four more months but never regained consciousness. He died in June 1957, Lilly at his side. She died two years later, never adapting to her beloved husband's absence. HL Hunt turned 85. His health was failing. Chronic back pain forced him into a wheelchair. He finally consented to be driven to his office by chauffeur. On September 13, 1974, the old man collapsed at his desk. He was rushed to the hospital. The diagnosis, advanced cancer of the liver. Hunt never left the hospital. The day after Thanksgiving, his heart gave out and he died. His obituary in the Texas monthly said he was many men in one. Contradictory, good and bad, but on a larger scale right out of Anne Rand. In the age of midgets and conformists, he was a rogue who broke rules and cut a large swath. And at last laid down with a smile. This and similar eulogies were an early sign of a developing Texas nostalgia, a harking to the days when giants walked the oil fields. When men like Hunt and Clint and Sid and Roy helped build something unique in mid-century Texas, an image and culture, loud, boisterous, money-hungry, and a bit silly, but proud and independent. And that's where I'll leave it. If you're looking for a wild story, pick up the book. It was absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed reading this. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, or by going to founderspodcast.com, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 149 books down 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.