Word: murchison
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...Calf on Credit. The Murchisons have been rich all their lives, began early to get their education in high finance. While they were still toddlers, Father Clint Sr. switched from buying oil leases, in partnership with the late Sid Richardson, into oil drilling. A brilliant trader, old Clint Murchison built his original holdings almost entirely by credit, swapping a share of one oil lease for money to start a second. In 1925, after his fortune had reached $5,000,000, Clint took a brief fling at retirement. But after his wife's death in 1927 he went back...
Calvinistic Compulsion. The Texas to which the Murchison boys returned was changing fast, was no longer just a cornucopia shaped like an oil well. Among the Dallas millionaires, Trammell Crow made his fortune by building and operating warehouses in a dozen states, and Carr P. Collins and his sons got their multimillion-dollar stake in the insurance business. Texas Instruments Chairman Erik Jonsson was busy piling up what eventually became $100 million in electronics, and Leo Corrigan was rapidly multiplying his wealth by building a hotel combine that now stretches from the Bahamas to Hong Kong...
...excitement of the risk and the satisfaction of pulling off a deal. And with an almost Calvinistic compulsion, they all drove themselves to work, work, work-even after they had made more money than they could ever personally use. "We are obligated to do something useful," says Clint Murchison Jr., "and the most useful thing I can do is be in business. The most important thing about money is as a measure of your value in the economy...
Once, That's All. John and Clint Murchison had some early trouble establishing their value. John got stuck in an unprofitable timber investment in the Northwest, lost millions in mining uranium. Clint Jr. plunged into a residential deal in Dallas on which old Clint figured a smart operator could have made a million. Clint Jr. lost half a million. Said old Clint: "You can afford to go broke once, but that...
Coming & Going. In the early 1950s, now confident of the boys' business abilities. Clint Sr. gradually turned over to them a loose entity called Murchison Brothers, which he had set up in 1942. In one shrewd deal after another, the brothers proceeded to acquire or build up housing projects from Florida to Los Angeles, construction-material companies in a dozen cities, land developments all across the U.S., two water systems, several insurance companies and a corralful of other properties. Not content with making the building supplies for the houses they construct, they build the roads and the streets over...