Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May, 1968 issue of Fortune.
The U.S. has become so affluent that there no longer is any great prestige in being a mere millionaire. The very word “millionaire” is seldom used nowadays; indeed, it has an almost quaint sound. It belongs to the era some decades back when a net worth of $1 million was considered a “fortune”; a millionaire was a member of a small class, and therefore a natural object of curiosity. To have a net worth of $1 million today is to be, much of the time, indistinguishable from members of the omnipresent middle class.
How many Americans are now wealthy enough to be thought of roughly as we once thought of millionaires? How many command the means to live—by the demanding standards of the late 1960’s—in spectacular luxury? How many have the power, if not necessarily the inclination, to intervene decisively in sizable business deals? When FORTUNE looked at the Super Rich in 1957, it drew the line at $50 million. (See “The Fifty-Million-Dollar Man,” November, 1957.) At that time, it appeared, 155 individuals were over the line. Today, partly because of inflation but mainly because much higher standards seem appropriate, the cut-off figure must be doubled. The question, then, is how many Americans are worth at least $100 million.
In the 1957 article it was estimated that forty-five of the 155 were worth $100 million or more. Today, after a four-month study that entailed analysis of public records (e.g., proxy statements) and hundreds of interviews, we believe we can identify 153 individuals whose net worth, including wealth held by their spouses, minor children, trusts, and foundations, makes them centimillionaires. (Neither compilation can be considered definitive, however; some forms of wealth—and some of the Super Rich themselves—absolutely defy detection.) A sizable minority—perhaps a third—were men of modest means and obscure reputation a decade ago; i.e., they did not come close to making the 1957 list. Despite their immense wealth, some of them remain obscure even today. Indeed, it seems likely that most readers will find names in this article (and in the list on page 156, which includes sixty-six individuals estimated to have at least $150 million) that are entirely new to them, and other names that they had never associated with nine-digit fortunes.
One finding, then, is that it is still possible to build a great fortune rapidly, and starting from a very low base. However, heirs and heiresses are well represented in the list on page 156; about half of the people with $150 million or more inherited the bulk of it. The notion that du Ponts, Fords, Mellons, and Rockefellers are among America’s wealthiest citizens happens to be true.
Returns on ingenuity
Of the self-made centimillionaires, one of the wealthiest of all is Dr. Edwin H. Land, fifty-eight, founder and chairman of Polaroid Corp. Dr. Land’s financial position was extremely precarious not so long ago, and it often appeared that a little bad luck would be enough to overwhelm Polaroid. During the 1940’s, as he worked endless hours to develop the sixty-second camera, his company went into a frightening decline. Toward the end of 1948, when the camera finally was placed on the market, Polaroid’s annual sales had dropped to $1,500,000, less than a tenth of their level three years earlier, and the company was suffering its third large deficit in a row. The stock also was weak; Dr. Land’s controlling interest was worth only about $1,500,000. What has happened since is one of the great miracles of business, fully documented and widely publicized, but still awesome to contemplate. The camera became a smashing success, the company’s sales increased over two-hundredfold, and the inventor’s wealth increased even more. Dr. Land and his wife now hold around a half-billion dollars’ worth of Polaroid stock.
While Dr. Land’s achievement was exceptionally dramatic and lucrative, one can cite many other modern-day entrepreneurs who entered the marketplace with little more than their ingenuity and daring, and proceeded to reap stupendous returns; here are just a few:
• David Packard, fifty-five, and William R. Hewlett, fifty-four, chairman and president respectively of the Hewlett-Packard Co., went into business in 1939, after earning their electrical-engineering degrees at Stanford University. Hewlett had developed a new type of audio oscillator while studying at Stanford, and the partners later sold eight to the Walt Disney studios, which used them to pro duce sound effects for Fantasia. The pair’s capital investment at the start was only $538, including a drill press, which they operated in Packard’s one-car garage. Hewlett-Packard today is a leading manufacturer of electronic measuring instruments (sales last year were $243 million), and its founders are ensconced high among the Super Rich; each owns a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of stock. As recently as the mid-1950’s, Hewlett and Packard spent much of their time tinkering in the company’s laboratories; but as the business grew, they confined themselves largely to administrative chores. Hewlett still devotes a lot of attention to the development of products, while Packard, as chief executive officer, concentrates on general business matters.
• W. Clement Stone, sixty-five, went into the insurance business while still in his teens, bringing to the venture scant capital but a large talent for salesmanship. It was a one-man operation until he married Jessie Tarson in 1923; after that, Mrs. Stone prepared and mailed the correspondence while Stone was out selling. Today his firm, the Combined Insurance Co. of America, has more than a thousand employees, and $142 million in assets. Its stock has soared since it was offered to the public six and a half years ago, and the holdings of Stone, his wife, and their foundation recently totaled $130 million. Stone has given his family shares worth another $127 million, and his other investments amount to perhaps $70 million more. Some of Stone’s fellow Chicagoans find him refreshingly free of countinghouse mannerisms, and wonder that he could have made so much money. He explains that he was inspired early in life by a “self-help” book, which taught him “the art of self-motivation.” Stone now can write that sort of book himself—and in fact he has. He is the author of one entitled The Success System That Never Fails, and co-author of another entitled Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.
• O. Wayne Rollins, fifty-five, chairman and president of Rollins, Inc., started a radio station in tiny Georgetown, Delaware, twenty years ago, after his brother John, who sold cars there, complained that he had no place to advertise. The Rollins broadcasting chain has since grown to eight radio stations and three television stations, mostly on the Atlantic seaboard, and the company has diversified into outdoor advertising, cosmetics, building maintenance, and pest control; revenues last year were $78 million. Rollins, who was born on a farm in Ringgold, Georgia, worked for ten years in the laboratory of a textile mill in nearby Chattanooga, Tennessee, after his graduation from high school. The job finally repelled him because, as he explains: “So much of your work is thrown away. I place too much value on time and money.” He later spent five years supervising the production of TNT for Hercules, and he was operating the Catoosa Mineral Springs, a Georgia resort, when he decided to go into broadcasting. Rollins has avidly purchased real estate through the years, most notably—and presciently—in Florida, and now reckons his fortune at well over $100 million, some $70 million of it in his company’s stock, which is listed on the American Stock Exchange.
• E. Claiborne Robins, fifty-seven, took over the family drug company, A. H. Robins, in 1933, after his graduation from pharmacy school. The company had been barely kept alive by his widowed mother; sales in that depression-ridden year were only $4,800. Under his guidance, A. H. Robins began doing its own research, and diversified into pet foods and cosmetics (Chap Stick); last year the sales reached $100 million. Robins is celebrated for his paternal devotion to his employees. In 1957 he took them all—there were 132 at the time—to Havana for a five-day vacation. While he no longer can offer that particular fringe benefit, he does send each one—they now number more than 2,000—birthday and Christmas presents. When A. H. Robins went public in 1963, part of the offering was reserved for the employees; the stock has since tripled in price. Robins and his family, while they have sold a third of their original holdings, still own well over $200 million worth.
As these examples suggest, the great new fortunes are being made in much the same manner as the great old ones. It still is necessary to enter a business at or near the ground floor, to hold a major interest in the stock, and to resist selling during hard times. One significant change is that the new fortunes are being made in entirely different industries. The wealth of many of today’s Super Rich heirs originally came from automobiles, chemicals, food processing, oil, railroading, and steel—industries that now are basic, and no longer growing rapidly. The new fortunes are coming from industries that are still growing rapidly, but seem destined to become basic—e.g., communications, drugs and cosmetics, insurance, and the various high-technology industries.
The high-technology companies are producing rich proprietors with astonishing speed. Because these companies are relatively new, only a few of their proprietors currently are centimillionaires. But it seems plain that many more eventually will be, as the goods and services they provide become essential to the economy. Investors already are paying generously for dozens of companies with intriguing prospects but brief histories, and one can point to several individuals who are worth scores of millions, but were worth very little a few years (or even months) ago. An arresting example is Dr. An Wang, forty-eight, who founded Wang Laboratories, a computer manufacturer, in 1951, three years after getting his Ph.D. degree at Harvard. Dr. Wang, a native of Shanghai, offered some stock to the public last August at $12.50 a share, or twenty-five times earnings for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1967. By late October, investors had bid the price up to $81, boosting the value of the shares held by Wang, his wife, and their trust to $92 million. More recently, their holdings were worth $60 million. William C. Norris, fifty-seven, who founded Control Data Corp. only eleven years ago, saw his holdings grow to $67 million last December, when investors were appraising the company at well over a hundred times its earnings for fiscal 1967. By mid-March, however, his shares were worth only $45 million.
Because the high-technology stocks are so volatile, they provide an uncertain foundation for a great fortune. The riskiest common stocks generally are those with the highest price-earnings ratios; in the market slump early this year, for example, the so-called “glamour” issues fell much more sharply than most other stocks. Even Dr. Land, whose company’s stock recently was selling at more than fifty times last year’s earnings, received a severe jolt. He and his wife watched the value of their Polaroid holdings decline by $198 million between early December and mid-March, including a plunge of more than $42 million in a single day during February. Howard Vollum and M. J. Murdock, co-founders of Tektronix, a manufacturer of cathode-ray oscilloscopes, each held more than $115 million worth of their company’s stock in October; by mid-March the same holdings were worth less than $77 million each. J. Erik Jonsson, sixty-six, former chairman of Texas Instruments and currently the mayor of Dallas, had $100 million worth of T.I. stock in October, but saw his stake shrink to less than $70 million in February, when the company disclosed that its earnings per share had fallen 33 percent last year. And Charles B. (Tex) Thornton, chairman of Litton Industries, whose company also has had earnings problems, watched his holdings drop from $147 million in October to $79 million by mid-March.
Precipitous stock-market declines are not limited to high-priced, high-technology stocks. When a company runs into sudden trouble, as Texas Instruments and Litton did, the market usually reacts ferociously; and anyone who has a large fortune bound up in that company may see it decimated as swiftly as it was built. This lesson recently was brought home to Edward J. Daly, forty-five, who eighteen years ago paid $50,000 in cash for World Airways, a charter airline. The company flourished, and Daly made a public offering in April, 1966. The value of Daly’s holdings rose from $100 million at the time of the offering to $337 million last July; then the stock went into a nose dive, and in the next eight months Daly lost more than $200 million in paper profits. The decline was touched off by a federal-court ruling, now under appeal, which would prohibit World and other charter airlines from offering “inclusive” tours of foreign countries—tours including meals, lodging, and sightseeing in the price, as well as transportation. (The suit had been brought by three scheduled airlines.) World Airways gets two-thirds of its revenue from military flights—chiefly, shuttling troops between the U.S. and Vietnam—and the inclusive tours might considerably lessen its dependence on the government.
Oilmen in troubled waters
While new sources of great wealth have burgeoned in recent years, a famous traditional source—oil—has been on the wane. Many people immediately think of oil, and of Texas oil in particular, when the subject of wealth is raised; and in 1957, when FORTUNE published its first study of the richest Americans, there was reason to make this association. One feature of that study was a list of seventy-six individuals whose fortunes were estimated at $75 million or more. Ten of them (including seven Texans) were independent oilmen. The current counterpart, the new list of sixty-six individuals with $150 million or more, includes just four independent oilmen (all Texans). The only new independent on the list is N. Bunker Hunt, forty-two, a son of H. L. Hunt. One other oilman, Leon Hess, fifty-four, chairman of Hess Oil & Chemical, is new to the list; but his is an integrated operation, heavily involved the retail marketing of gasoline.
Oil production has come to be a lot less profitable than it was in the good old days. When “Dad” Joiner tapped the East Texas field in 1930, starting the great oil rush, many deposits were shallow, and drilling costs were therefore moderate. Any wildcatter lucky enough to lease the right tract of land could make an easy fortune. A good strike paid for the drilling expenses—about $15,000 per well—in a matter of days, and what came out of the ground afterward was mostly profit. But the oil remaining untapped today is much less accessible. The average depth per well has been steadily increasing, and so has the percentage of “dry holes.” An oil prospector can run up several million dollars in costs between gushers now, and that kind of expense can hurt even the best established operators. As for offshore drilling, the investment required is staggering; a single offshore rig can cost as much as $10 million, or $20,000 a day when leased, which effectively leaves the field to the biggest operators. When he does strike oil, moreover, the wildcatter runs up against the limitations that many states (Texas in particular) impose on the amount each operator may take out of the ground. On top of all this, the market price of crude oil is just about the same as it was a decade ago. So it’s no wonder that many independents have been selling out to the major integrated companies.
Some oilmen have found other lucrative investments. Two old-guard independents, R. E. Smith, seventy-three, and James S. Abercrombie, seventy-six, both of Houston, remain in the upper reaches of the Super Rich because they diversified. Bob Smith estimates his fortune at between $300 million and $400 million, much of it in undeveloped land in and around Houston, which he shrewdly began buying a couple of decades ago. Abercrombie, who is worth close to $200 million, sold the bulk of his oil holdings in 1946; his wealth now is largely in the Cameron Iron Works, which makes oil-production equipment and aerospace products. N. Bunker Hunt, a rare example of an oilman who has done spectacularly well in recent years without diversifying, made most of his fortune outside the U.S. He is a fifty-fifty partner, with the British Petroleum Co., in a venture that has produced some remarkable strikes in Libya’s Sarir field. His wealth now is estimated at close to a half-billion dollars, and some of his admirers in Dallas are convinced that he will become even richer than H. L. Hunt.
Death and taxes
Inheritance also has been declining lately as a source of great wealth. The decline is mostly due to the federal estate tax, which has been at its present high levels since the early years of World War II. The tax is graduated from 3 to 77 percent, with the top rate applying to estates greater than $10 million. Half of a man’s estate can remain untaxed until his wife’s death, and state death taxes are partly deductible (every state except Nevada has its own estate or inheritance tax). But hitting with full force, the federal tax can reduce a $100-million estate to less than $25 million.
Since the gift tax is generally less severe than the estate tax, many of the Super Rich transfer part of their wealth to their prospective heirs in the form of gifts. H. L. Hunt is said to have established trusts currently worth more than $100 million for each of his six children. The four children of Richard King Mellon and the two children of his cousin Paul Mellon also are reputed to have at least $100 million each. The federal gift tax, which is levied upon the donor rather than the recipient, amounts to $4,566,150 for the first $10 million, plus 57.75 percent on the balance. At these rates, a man could give his son $100 million free and clear with a total outlay of $156,541,150; to bequeath his son $100 million after taxes—even if the son were the sole heir—he would have to leave an estate of perhaps $400 million. Still, only those in the ionosphere of wealth, such as the Mellons, seem equipped to create centimillionaires out of pocket while retaining enough money for themselves. Of the twenty-two individuals on FORTUNE’s 1957 roster who have since died, only one passed along—through gifts and bequests—enough money to place an heir on the new list on page 156. That was Sarah Mellon Scaife, Richard King Mellon’s sister, who placed two: her son, Richard Mellon Scaife, and her daughter, Cordelia Scaife May.
Walker P. Inman Jr., sixteen, a member of the Duke family, acquired a large fortune through inheritance in recent years despite taxes. An orphan who lives with an aunt and uncle at Brunson, South Carolina, he inherited the bulk of two large estates—his father’s and a grandmother’s. Skipper, as he is called, is already a centimillionaire, probably the nation’s youngest. It would require a compound annual appreciation of only 6½ percent to make him a billionaire twice over by the time he is eligible for social-security payments.
Another of the Super Rich who received two large bequests early in life is Mrs. Lester J. Norris, nee Dellora F. Angell, a niece of the late John W. (Bet-a-Million) Gates. Mrs. Norris, now sixty-five, inherited her money from Gates, who died in 1913, and from his wife, also named Dellora, who died five years later. Gates was the head of the old American Steel & Wire Co., now part of U.S. Steel. He was nicknamed “Bet-a-Million” because he reputedly bet $1 million on a horse race. Mrs. Norris, a resident of St. Charles, Illinois, recently owned 1,460,510 shares of Texaco, which probably made her the company’s largest stockholder; her husband, with another 235,455 shares, is on the board of directors. The combined value of their Texaco holdings is about $125 million.
Some of the Super Rich who inherited substantial wealth can nevertheless be fairly described as builders of wealth. The two most prominent examples are the two richest Americans of all, J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes, both of whom have enormously increased the fortunes left them by their fathers. Another example is Charles W. Engelhard Jr., fifty-one, who took over a solid but inconspicuous precious-metals business after his father died in 1950, and turned it into an international colossus. The family holding company, Engelhard Hanovia, now has interests in Engelhard Minerals & Chemicals, International Silver, Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting, several South African mining companies, and two closed-end investment companies—Eurofund and American-South African Investment. Still another heir who built much of his own fortune is Albert C. Buehler, seventy. He is largely responsible for the success of the Victor Comptometer Corp., a descendant of the old Victor Adding Machine Co., which his late father acquired almost by accident fifty years ago. As Buehler likes to tell it, his father, who owned a retail meat business in Chicago, thought he was buying a machine from a Victor salesman, when in fact he was getting a few shares of the company. The elder Buehler became interested in Victor, bought a controlling interest, and made Albert an officer. In October, 1961, the company merged with Comptometer Corp. Finding Comptometer’s facilities outmoded and its sales organization inefficient, Buehler undertook drastic reforms. Victor Comptometer’s earnings per share have risen 225 percent in six years.
“People who don’t work are stupid”
The extraordinary motivation these men have displayed, to say nothing of how well they have performed, would have surprised the late William K. Vanderbilt (a grandson of the Commodore), who declared, back in 1905, that inherited wealth “is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.” If that was ever really true (it wasn’t true of William K. Vanderbilt) it surely isn’t now. Most of the heirs to great fortunes, it seems, are busy making more money.
But what keeps them busy? Apparently not a desire for more money, or even for more of the things money can buy. Gaylord Donnelley, fifty-seven, chairman of R.R. Donnelley & Sons, the Chicago printing company, says he considers his participation a “challenge” and an “obligation to a team” (he is a grandson of the founder). Robert W. Galvin, forty-five, whose father founded Motorola, Inc., finds work necessary to “satisfy my sense of responsibility.” E. Roland Noel Harriman, seventy-two, a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., spends four days a week at the office, and carries away plenty of homework. “Only by remaining active can one keep from stagnating and becoming senile,” he says. The thought is echoed by a younger man, W. Van Alan Clark Jr., forty-eight, who gets more than a million dollars a year in dividends from his holdings in Avon Products (his mother’s father, David McConnell, started the company). “People who don’t work,” says Clark, “are dull as hell, vapid, and stupid. I would give up every dollar I have to spend my life with people in the real world.” Clark served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for twelve years, and then helped organize the Sippican Corp., an electronics firm based in Marion, Massachusetts. He has made a million on his own in that venture.
The Super Rich, both heirs and self-made men, seem quite serious, not only in their work but in their personal lives as well. While they can afford almost any luxury, they rarely use their wealth in a frivolous or ostentatious manner. Taken together, they are more notable as big givers than as big spenders. To some extent, the Super Rich avoid conspicuous consumption because they want to avoid attracting the attention of favor seekers, salesmen, and people with propositions. (“Everybody has a proposition for me,” complains Kirk Kerkorian, fifty, the Las Vegas centimillionaire who founded Trans International Airlines.) But taste, style, and principle are also involved. The Super Rich are a rather earnest lot.
Wealth is power
One very rich man sometimes said to be ostentatious is W. Clement Stone, who rides around in a gold-colored Cadillac limousine. A fellow Chicagoan, also a man of great wealth, calls Stone the most ostentatious rich man he knows. But Stone’s lavishness is less than meets the eye. The limousine is five years old, and Stone has only one other car. He lives the year round in a single residence. And he, too, is a big giver. “Wealth is power,” he says, but then he goes on to explain what he means by power: “With money you can do good. Your whole horizon changes.” Stone is a bountiful patron of the arts. He has provided grants and scholarships for many writers, singers, musicians, and actors, and has bought more than three hundred paintings from unknown artists, including an inmate of a prison in Australia.*
Many of the Super Rich share Stone’s feeling that “with money you can do good.” Their ideas of doing good vary greatly, of course, but a recurrent theme is discernible—they want to use their money in ways that give them a sense of high purpose. For example, Robert J. Kleberg Jr., proprietor of the King Ranch in Texas, seems embarrassed by his wealth, and responds belligerently when a would-be interviewer tries to question him about it. Kleberg, seventy-two, likes to think of himself as a geneticist and agronomist—he has developed his own breed of cattle (Santa Gertrudis) and new strains of grass—and considers his money a means to support his work in these fields.
William Benton, sixty-eight, a former adman (Benton & Bowles), who with his family holds all the common stock of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, calls his ownership a “trusteeship” for the improvement of education. He invested only $100,000 in the business (in 1943), and if he sold today he could get more than a thousand times that amount; but he does not intend to sell, or even go public. He plans to spend $15 million over the next five years to improve the Britannica; if he were accountable to other shareholders, he says, he might have had to hold the expense to $5 million.
The Super Rich typically remain dedicated to the organizations through which they made their money, long after they have made all the money they want. John D. MacArthur, seventy-one, owner of Chicago’s Bankers Life & Casualty Co., could expect to gross more than $400 million if he sold his insurance company and other holdings in banking, gas and oil, real estate, and broadcasting. But he’d rather be “a poor man” than do that, he says. “I spent a lifetime building an institution, and I can’t just walk away and forget it.” During a four-hour interview, MacArthur repeatedly disavowed any hobbies, recreations, or other nonbusiness interests, but he finally broke down and admitted that he likes dogs (he has a Weimaraner, and his wife has a poodle).
Like many others among the Super Rich, Charles Allen Jr., sixty-five, probably the most successful venture capitalist of modern times, insists that moneymaking motives are far from foremost in his dealings. “Success is not financial,” he says. As founder and principal owner of Allen & Co., the New York investment-banking firm, he has nurtured dozens of young companies. In doing so, he has profited mightily, but he is also, he feels, a man of good works. His most spectacularly profitable investment—he, his firm, and his family recently held $82 million worth of the stock—has been Syntex Corp., a maker of synthetic hormone products, notably contraceptive pills. Allen says he was attracted to Syntex because of its potential contribution to public health.
A surprising restraint
The old urge for conspicuous consumption appears to have been channeled largely into a single activity—art collecting. Here the Super Rich spend lavishly. At least ten U.S. centimillionaires own collections valued at $20 million or more. Some rich collectors, such as Henry Francis du Pont, who assembled the $80-million Winterthur Museum collection in Wilmington, are so dedicated to art that they qualify as scholars. “Few human activities,” rhapsodizes J. Paul Getty in his book The Joys of Collecting, “provide an individual with a greater sense of personal gratification than the assembling of a collection of art objects that appeal to him and that he feels have true and lasting beauty.”
Art aside, the Super Rich spend with a restraint that would surprise the nonrich. To many people, the mention of nine-digit fortunes conjures up images of custom-built limousines, private airplanes, yachts, and a home in every port. And some of the Super Rich do come close to that stereotype. Marjorie Merriweather Post, eighty-one, the General Foods heiress, has three residences, numerous cars and boats, and a four-engine airplane that carries seventeen passengers and a crew of five; her living expenses run to about $2 million a year. But, in general, the rich who spend immoderately are likely to be only moderately rich. “The really wealthy,” says Albert Buehler, “are quiet, and don’t flash their money around.” Buehler expresses contempt for the sort of people who tip too heavily and demand the best tables in restaurants. “I’m content,” he says, “to sit over in the corner and wait my turn.”
Many of the Super Rich are as frugal as any middle-class suburbanite, getting by with a couple of cars, a house, and perhaps a summer cottage with a boat. A few live even more moderately than that—for example, S. Mark Taper, sixty-six, chairman of California’s First Charter Financial Corp., and John W. Kieckhefer, eighty-one, of Phoenix, who made his fortune during a half-century in the container business. They get along with one home, one car, and no further means of locomotion but their feet. Indeed, the Super Rich today seem close to blending with the rest of the affluent society. “There is no great difference between the middle-class and the wealthy,” says W. Clement Stone. “The wealthy man has gotten out of debt, that’s all.”
*Stone also likes to help young businessmen, and on at least one occasion his helpfulness proved highly profitable. In 1955 a man named Leonard H. Lavin asked him to cosign a $400,000 bank loan. Latin said he would use the money to start a company to market his new hair dressing. Stone assented, taking some stock in the company in return for the favor. Today Latin’s enterprise is the Alberto-Culver Co., with annual sales of $115 million, and Stone’s holdings are worth about $8 million.
