History is full of names that they lose their fortunes for an achievement of bad decisionsbut also of others who lost their assets due to a stroke of bad luck. The story of Nelson Bunker Hunt is one of the latter, who not only lost his fortune once due to a stroke of bad luck: he lost it twiceand neither time was the fault entirely his.
The name of this millionaire is barely known today, but between the late 70s and early 80s, he was synonymous with enormous wealth: the richest man on the planet, owner of oil wells in the Libyan desert and such a large portion of the world silver market that he managed to twist the arm of Wall Street.
A coup colonel and a bad Thursday in 1980 reminded him that no fortune, no matter how enormous, is safe from history.
From Arkansas to the Libyan desert after the black gold
Nelson was born in 1926 in El Dorado, Arkansas. His father, H. L. Huntwas already an oil magnate with fifteen children from three different women. Nelson wanted to match him, at least in terms of wealth, so he went looking for oil outside of Texas.
His first attempts in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan They were a total failure. But the third time’s the charm and in 1961 he tried his luck in Libya. A stroke of luck led the young entrepreneur to obtain Concession 65, a huge area of 32,400 square kilometers of desert land to exploit the Sarir sitewhich still today continues to be the largest oil field of the country. That made him a multimillionaire almost overnight.
As and how did he count the BBCfor more than a decade, Sarir generated billions of dollars for Hunt’s company.
Muammar al-Gaddafi
It all ended in 1973, when a colonel named Muammar al-Gaddafi took power and nationalized all its oil wells without prior notice. Over time, that same site served to amass the dictator’s personal fortune, which some researchers even valued at more than 200,000 million of dollars. However, Hunt lost the goose that laid the golden (black) eggs of his oil empire due to a coup d’état, and bad luck, that he did not see coming.
Silver as an unexpected refuge
Far from giving up, Hunt He reinvested what was left of his fortune on ranches, in breeding thoroughbred horses and in new oil businesses. Together with his brothers Herbert and Lamar, he began buying silver in the mid-seventies, as strategy to protect your fortune against inflation.
What started as an investment in a safe haven soon became an obsession. By 1979 the Hunts controlled about a third of all the money deprived of the planet. The price of silver went from trading at six dollars an ounce to exceeding $49.45 thanks to the position of power over the silver market exercised by the Hunt brothers. Which implied that his fortune was also growing in the same proportion.
The Hunt brothers’ control of the silver market reached levels that even Tiffany’s published an advertisement in it New York Times accusing them of artificially make any silver object more expensivefrom baby spoons to photo reels. “We find it unacceptable for anyone to hoard billions, yes, billions, of dollars in silver and therefore drive up the price so high that others have to pay artificially high prices for items made of silver,” the article read.
According what was published for the BBCthe silver magnate reportedly told Time magazine in January 1980 that “silver seemed safer than oil concessions abroad. And precious metals were a good hedge against paper money.”
Anyone has a bad Thursday
Thursday, March 27, 1980 would be a day that would be burned into Hunt’s head. His arrived second major financial disaster.
That day, known as Silver Thursdaythe price of silver plummeted below $11 in a matter of hours. The Hunts’ silver position, valued shortly before at more than $4.5 billion, was transformed into a debt of $1.7 billion, as detailed Britannica.
A group of New York banks had to set up an emergency line of credit to prevent the Hunt bankruptcy from dragging down half of Wall Street with them. Years of trials later, the Futures Trading Commission fined them each $10 million and a lifetime ban to operate with raw materials.
In 1988, Nelson Bunker Hunt officially declared bankruptcy. His assets, then valued at just 150 million, were completely liquidated to pay debts and back taxes. He had to sell up to his 580 purebred horses. When asked by Congress about his fortune, he replied with dark humor: “a billion dollars is not what it used to be.” He spent his last years in a modest house in Dallas, and died in 2014 in a residence, at 88 years old.
His brother Herbert had better luck: sold his assets in Montana for $1.5 billion in 2012 and died in 2024 with a assets of 4.7 billion dollars, according to Forbes. Nelson, on the other hand, went down in history as the man who He was the richest on the planet and ended up with nothing… twice.
Image | Hall of FameUnsplash (Mohamed Fsili, Scottsdale Mint, Colton Sturgeon), Flikr (Esther Vargas)
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