This year the billionaires of the Lone Star State fill 35 slots on this year’s soul world news That’s down four from last year. The biggest reason Texas is losing
ground to other states — a billion just ain’t what it used to be. This
year’s threshhold for inclusion in the soul world news 400 was $1.7 billion, up
from $1.55 billion last year. Coming in just below that cut were such
notables as Houston legal eagle Joe Jamail, Dallas real estate boss Ross Perot, Jr. and San Antonio natural gas tycoon Rodney Lewis. They’ll still make our annual Forbes Global Billionaire’s list next spring.
Fort Worth dealmaker Richard Rainwater did make the Forbes 400 this year, but passed away as we were going to press with the magazine after a 6-year fight with a brain disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. You can read our remembrance of Rainwater here.
As for geographical distribution, Houston and Dallas are tied with 12 rich listers each, while Fort Worth has 6 and Austin 3.
One of those calling Austin home is the only newcomer to the list, private equity boss Robert Smith (that’s him here on the cover of Forbes.)
There’s some caveats to consider while perusing this list. Valuing and ranking tycoons is far more of an art than a science. Many of these luminaries (or their representatives) talk to Forbes reporters, but others do not. We endeavor to always be conservative in our valuations, to err on the side of attributing too little to them, rather than too much. That said, I’m convinced there remain quite a few hidden billionaires out there who haven’t hit our radar screen (especially here in Houston). If you know of someone whose story ought to be known, please drop me a line at chelman@forbes.com. With some luck Texas might some day be able to supplant California and New York as the capital of American wealth creation.
The Texas Rich List
1. Alice Walton
$32 billion
Age 60
Fort Worth
#12 on Forbes 400
Alice Walton’s fortune stems from her stake in mega-retailer Wal-Mart, which her father Sam founded back in 1962. Unlike her siblings Rob and Jim — also billionaires — Alice hasn’t taken an active role in the company, instead focusing on collecting and curating art. Her work culminated in the opening of the Crystal Bridges Art Museum in her hometown of Bentonville, Ark., in 2011. In 2013, she purchased a New Jersey home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and had it moved down to the museum’s campus; it opens for tours in fall. Other staples of the collection include works from the likes of Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Georgia O’Keeffe. Some of the pieces in the museum she donated from her personal collection, which is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. She put her Texas ranch up for sale in September, asking nearly $20 million for the 1,432-acre estate along the Brazos river near Fort Worth. She’s also dabbled in political spending, mostly to the Republican party. In 2014 she donated $25,000 to establish a political super-PAC supporting a U.S. presidential bid by Hillary Clinton. Together Alice, her two brothers and their sister-in-law Christy (widow of their brother John, who died in a plane crash) own 51% of Wal-Mart, with 11,000 stores. The stock price fell 15% in the past year, owing in part to a slowdown in key markets like Brazil and China.
2. Michael Dell
$19.1 billion
Age 50
Austin
#23 on the Forbes 400
Ever since Michael Dell bought out his computer company two years ago, he has been trumpeting the virtues of private ownership. “As a private company, Dell now has the freedom to take a long-term view,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year. “No more pulling R&D and growth investments to make in-quarter numbers. No more having a small group of vocal investors hijack the public perception of our strategy while we’re fully focused on building for the future.” He has reason to be pleased. His business is kicking off more than $2 billion in free cash flow each year, and he is using it to chip away at the $18 billion in debt he and private equity partner Silver Lake Management assumed when they took control over the company in 2013. In 1984, at age 19 Dell started the computer giant in his U.T. dorm room with $1,000. Four years later, it went public with a market capitalization of $85 million. By the time he took it private again in 2013, the company was worth $25 billion. He still holds a 70% stake but keeps most of his fortune in his private investment firm MSD Capital, whose wide array of investments includes car deal Asbury Automotive, PVH Corp. (parent to Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein) and DineEquity (operator of IHOP and Applebee’s).
3. Andrew Beal
$11 billion
Age 62
Dallas
#42 on the Forbes 400
Andy Beal is a college dropout, a self-taught math genius, and one of the smartest investors in the country. With an expert eye for market movements, Beal made a tidy sum during the Great Recession, buying distressed assets while the nation’s biggest banks were getting taxpayer bailouts. Sensing weakness in credit markets leading up to the financial crisis, Beal virtually stopped making or buying loans from 2004 to 2007. When the financial sector blew up in 2008, he snatched up beaten-down assets all over the country, including debt backed by a Houston refinery, a mortgage on an office building in Ohio and home loans from Alaska to Florida. Through his various Beal Banks in Texas and Nevada, the math whiz has built a team to lend to oil and gas producers; he believes the collapse in prices has opened new opportunities. In 2001 he gambled against the world’s top poker players at the Bellagio in Las Vegas in one of the highest-stakes poker games ever. The mathematics enthusiast developed the Beal Conjecture, a complex mathematical problem, in 1993, and offered $1 million to anyone who could solve it. Mathematicians have been stumped for decades. Beal is a donor to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.
4. Charles Butt
$10.7 billion
Age 77
San Antonio
#44 on the Forbes 400
Charles Butt started working for the family business, Texas grocery chain H-E-B, at age 8. Florence Butt, his grandmother, founded the company in 1905 after her husband was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was unable to work. Her son Howard took over in the 1920s and expanded throughout Texas. Charles became chairman and CEO in 1971 and is today the majority shareholder. Two of his siblings and two nephews own stakes in the company as well. H-E-B has 316 stores in Texas, plus 52 stores in Mexico, and donates 5% of pretax profits to charity.
5. Richard Kinder
$8.9 billion
Age 70
Houston
#52 on the Forbes 400
Pipeline tycoon and his wife, Nancy, have donated $2 million to a PAC for Jeb Bush, clearly hoping the candidate will be as friendly to the oil and gas industry as his older brother was. Though he’s still working to improve the political landscape for his pipeline company, Kinder Morgan, he handed over the CEO reins in June. Having cofounded the firm in 1997 after serving as president of Enron, Kinder has presided over some mammoth deals in recent years, including the $38 billion acquisition of El Paso Corp. in 2012 and the 2014 consolidation of Kinder’s four publicly traded affiliates into a single company. Kinder (a former Army captain) and his wife have donated more than $100 million from the Kinder Foundation to fund the construction of parks and museums in Houston. (For more on Kinder’s next act, check out this interview.)
6. Jeffery Hildebrand
$6.3 billion
Age 56
Houston
#73 on the Forbes 400
It has taken Jeffery Hildebrand 25 years to build the largest privately held oil company in America. A big focus these days is Alaska, where Hilcorp has been acquiring and reviving mature fields in the Cook Inlet and the North Slope. Further south, Hilcorp is a big driller in the Utica shale of Ohio (where authorities blame his operations for a string of small earthquakes in 2014). In September 2014 Hilcorp teamed with power generator NRG Energy on a world-scale project that will take carbon dioxide from a power plant and inject it into old fields to goose out more oil. The Houston billionaire started Hilcorp in 1989 with an eye toward buying up old oilfields, applying new technology to squeeze out profits. He’s also had success spearheading new plays. Hildebrand’s biggest payday came in 2011, when he turned a $100 million investment in the Eagle Ford shale into $1.8 billion with a sale to Marathon Oil. In 2010, as a reward for doubling the size of the company, every Hilcorp employee got $50,000 to buy a new car. For the next doubling, perhaps coming this year, the bonus is said to be $100,000. A horse lover, Hildebrand has built a polo field on his ranch in Aspen. Last year he bought a 957-acre property in Colorado that used to belong to John Denver. Hildebrand also serves on the boards of the Greater Houston Community Foundation, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. In downtown Houston, Hilcorp is building a new 24-story, 500,000 square feet tower.
7. Robert Rowling
$6.1 billion
Age 62
Dallas
#76 on the Forbes 400
In 1989 Rowling and his father Reese (d. 2001) sold most of their oil and gas assets to Texaco (now Chevron) for $500 million. Rowling reinvested some of that into buying the Omni Hotels chain, and since then he’s grown it into an empire. With more than 20,000 rooms at 60 locations, Omni now makes up the vast majority of Rowling’s net worth. Highlights include the Amelia Island Resort in Florida and Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Tx. Omni is the largest hotel chain not to offer in-room adult movies. Rowling also owns the Golds Gym chain and is a big donor to Republican candidates. Gave $25 million to the University of Texas business school in 2013.
Fort Worth dealmaker Richard Rainwater did make the Forbes 400 this year, but passed away as we were going to press with the magazine after a 6-year fight with a brain disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. You can read our remembrance of Rainwater here.
As for geographical distribution, Houston and Dallas are tied with 12 rich listers each, while Fort Worth has 6 and Austin 3.
One of those calling Austin home is the only newcomer to the list, private equity boss Robert Smith (that’s him here on the cover of Forbes.)
There’s some caveats to consider while perusing this list. Valuing and ranking tycoons is far more of an art than a science. Many of these luminaries (or their representatives) talk to Forbes reporters, but others do not. We endeavor to always be conservative in our valuations, to err on the side of attributing too little to them, rather than too much. That said, I’m convinced there remain quite a few hidden billionaires out there who haven’t hit our radar screen (especially here in Houston). If you know of someone whose story ought to be known, please drop me a line at chelman@forbes.com. With some luck Texas might some day be able to supplant California and New York as the capital of American wealth creation.
The Texas Rich List
1. Alice Walton
$32 billion
Age 60
Recommended by Forbes
#12 on Forbes 400
Alice Walton’s fortune stems from her stake in mega-retailer Wal-Mart, which her father Sam founded back in 1962. Unlike her siblings Rob and Jim — also billionaires — Alice hasn’t taken an active role in the company, instead focusing on collecting and curating art. Her work culminated in the opening of the Crystal Bridges Art Museum in her hometown of Bentonville, Ark., in 2011. In 2013, she purchased a New Jersey home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and had it moved down to the museum’s campus; it opens for tours in fall. Other staples of the collection include works from the likes of Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Georgia O’Keeffe. Some of the pieces in the museum she donated from her personal collection, which is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. She put her Texas ranch up for sale in September, asking nearly $20 million for the 1,432-acre estate along the Brazos river near Fort Worth. She’s also dabbled in political spending, mostly to the Republican party. In 2014 she donated $25,000 to establish a political super-PAC supporting a U.S. presidential bid by Hillary Clinton. Together Alice, her two brothers and their sister-in-law Christy (widow of their brother John, who died in a plane crash) own 51% of Wal-Mart, with 11,000 stores. The stock price fell 15% in the past year, owing in part to a slowdown in key markets like Brazil and China.
$19.1 billion
Age 50
Austin
#23 on the Forbes 400
Ever since Michael Dell bought out his computer company two years ago, he has been trumpeting the virtues of private ownership. “As a private company, Dell now has the freedom to take a long-term view,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year. “No more pulling R&D and growth investments to make in-quarter numbers. No more having a small group of vocal investors hijack the public perception of our strategy while we’re fully focused on building for the future.” He has reason to be pleased. His business is kicking off more than $2 billion in free cash flow each year, and he is using it to chip away at the $18 billion in debt he and private equity partner Silver Lake Management assumed when they took control over the company in 2013. In 1984, at age 19 Dell started the computer giant in his U.T. dorm room with $1,000. Four years later, it went public with a market capitalization of $85 million. By the time he took it private again in 2013, the company was worth $25 billion. He still holds a 70% stake but keeps most of his fortune in his private investment firm MSD Capital, whose wide array of investments includes car deal Asbury Automotive, PVH Corp. (parent to Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein) and DineEquity (operator of IHOP and Applebee’s).
3. Andrew Beal
$11 billion
Age 62
Dallas
#42 on the Forbes 400
Andy Beal is a college dropout, a self-taught math genius, and one of the smartest investors in the country. With an expert eye for market movements, Beal made a tidy sum during the Great Recession, buying distressed assets while the nation’s biggest banks were getting taxpayer bailouts. Sensing weakness in credit markets leading up to the financial crisis, Beal virtually stopped making or buying loans from 2004 to 2007. When the financial sector blew up in 2008, he snatched up beaten-down assets all over the country, including debt backed by a Houston refinery, a mortgage on an office building in Ohio and home loans from Alaska to Florida. Through his various Beal Banks in Texas and Nevada, the math whiz has built a team to lend to oil and gas producers; he believes the collapse in prices has opened new opportunities. In 2001 he gambled against the world’s top poker players at the Bellagio in Las Vegas in one of the highest-stakes poker games ever. The mathematics enthusiast developed the Beal Conjecture, a complex mathematical problem, in 1993, and offered $1 million to anyone who could solve it. Mathematicians have been stumped for decades. Beal is a donor to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.
4. Charles Butt
$10.7 billion
Age 77
San Antonio
#44 on the Forbes 400
Charles Butt started working for the family business, Texas grocery chain H-E-B, at age 8. Florence Butt, his grandmother, founded the company in 1905 after her husband was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was unable to work. Her son Howard took over in the 1920s and expanded throughout Texas. Charles became chairman and CEO in 1971 and is today the majority shareholder. Two of his siblings and two nephews own stakes in the company as well. H-E-B has 316 stores in Texas, plus 52 stores in Mexico, and donates 5% of pretax profits to charity.
5. Richard Kinder
$8.9 billion
Age 70
Houston
#52 on the Forbes 400
Pipeline tycoon and his wife, Nancy, have donated $2 million to a PAC for Jeb Bush, clearly hoping the candidate will be as friendly to the oil and gas industry as his older brother was. Though he’s still working to improve the political landscape for his pipeline company, Kinder Morgan, he handed over the CEO reins in June. Having cofounded the firm in 1997 after serving as president of Enron, Kinder has presided over some mammoth deals in recent years, including the $38 billion acquisition of El Paso Corp. in 2012 and the 2014 consolidation of Kinder’s four publicly traded affiliates into a single company. Kinder (a former Army captain) and his wife have donated more than $100 million from the Kinder Foundation to fund the construction of parks and museums in Houston. (For more on Kinder’s next act, check out this interview.)
6. Jeffery Hildebrand
$6.3 billion
Age 56
Houston
#73 on the Forbes 400
It has taken Jeffery Hildebrand 25 years to build the largest privately held oil company in America. A big focus these days is Alaska, where Hilcorp has been acquiring and reviving mature fields in the Cook Inlet and the North Slope. Further south, Hilcorp is a big driller in the Utica shale of Ohio (where authorities blame his operations for a string of small earthquakes in 2014). In September 2014 Hilcorp teamed with power generator NRG Energy on a world-scale project that will take carbon dioxide from a power plant and inject it into old fields to goose out more oil. The Houston billionaire started Hilcorp in 1989 with an eye toward buying up old oilfields, applying new technology to squeeze out profits. He’s also had success spearheading new plays. Hildebrand’s biggest payday came in 2011, when he turned a $100 million investment in the Eagle Ford shale into $1.8 billion with a sale to Marathon Oil. In 2010, as a reward for doubling the size of the company, every Hilcorp employee got $50,000 to buy a new car. For the next doubling, perhaps coming this year, the bonus is said to be $100,000. A horse lover, Hildebrand has built a polo field on his ranch in Aspen. Last year he bought a 957-acre property in Colorado that used to belong to John Denver. Hildebrand also serves on the boards of the Greater Houston Community Foundation, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. In downtown Houston, Hilcorp is building a new 24-story, 500,000 square feet tower.
7. Robert Rowling
$6.1 billion
Age 62
Dallas
#76 on the Forbes 400
In 1989 Rowling and his father Reese (d. 2001) sold most of their oil and gas assets to Texaco (now Chevron) for $500 million. Rowling reinvested some of that into buying the Omni Hotels chain, and since then he’s grown it into an empire. With more than 20,000 rooms at 60 locations, Omni now makes up the vast majority of Rowling’s net worth. Highlights include the Amelia Island Resort in Florida and Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Tx. Omni is the largest hotel chain not to offer in-room adult movies. Rowling also owns the Golds Gym chain and is a big donor to Republican candidates. Gave $25 million to the University of Texas business school in 2013.
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