If I Were A Rich Man

Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum . . .

The politics of wealth inequality are as old as mankind.

However, for better or worse, and with all due respect to Queen Elizabeth II and King Harald V, et al., we no longer bow to divine rulers (with the possible exception of some few celebrities).

What gets me is that amongst all the talk of the 1% vs. the 99%, 50% of the 99% support the 1%. Think about that one for a minute.

I ran across this link to an interactive map of the richest individual in each of the fifty states. This is the sort of article I would usually scroll by without slowing down, but something about it piqued my curiosity, and I wondered who was the richest person in my own state of Illinois.

It turns out that it's Chicago-based hedge fund manager, Ken Griffin, worth a middling five-point-five billion dollars. I then wondered, just who are these honchos who represent the wealthiest among us?

Oh, I forgot to mention 'hedge fund manager' and philanthropist. Without exception, every bio of these luminaries includes that description. Yes, they donate huge sums of money, so I will not insinuate here one of my favorite parables about the woman who gave two pennies (if you don't know it, look it up).

As I researched this map further, certain glaring inequalities beyond the numbers became instantly obvious, and I probably don't even need to point them out, but I will anyway. Out of the fifty, forty-two are men, and two of the eight women who made the list are Waltons. We'll get back to that.

Perhaps most tellingly and sadly, there is not one black face in the crowd.

I was also interested in seeing just where these fortunes came from. Again, as might be expected, the greatest generator of vast sums of capital, is capital. Fully twenty percent of these were from the financial sector - investments and banking. The list featured such notables as the Koch brothers who top the list for Kansas (Charles 41.4 B) and New York (David 41.4 B), and the Oracle of Omaha (NE) financial guru, Warren Buffett (63.1 B).

Real estate development was a biggie, with a smattering of heavy construction, manufacturing, energy, agriculture, communications, computing, and retail. Of course, the people in these rarefied airs have their fingers in many pies, heading and chairing conglomerations that include many or all of these enterprises.

Take Dennis Washington of Montana. In 1964, at age 30, he started Washington Construction with one bulldozer. Today, the privately held consortium builds highways and dams, mines copper and rare earths, and has diversified interests in railroads, marine services, coastal shipping, aviation and real estate.

I think my biggest shock was finding out that the richest man in Wisconsin was not a cheesemaker. (In fact, it is John Menard of the namesake home improvement retailer.)

There were many names I recognized, such as Jacqueline Mars of Virginia, the heiress to the Mars candy dynasty, and Mary Alice Dorrance Malone. Don't recognize the name? You've been eating her family's alphabet and chicken noodle soup since you were two years old.

Some of the names I did not recognize, for example, Thomas Frist of Tennessee. Surely some country music superstar from Nashville or the owner of Opryland would rule that roost. But Mr. Frist is the co-founder of Hospital Corporation of America, the largest for-profit operator of health care facilities in the world. Based in Nashville, it currently manages 162 hospitals and 113 freestanding surgery centers in the United States and United Kingdom. That's what I call a major operation.

Giving voice to the all-American creed "Sex Sells," we find Ohioan, Les Wexner. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he turned his parents general merchandise store into the Limited Brands Corporation, which includes retail outlets The Limited, Bath & Body Works, The White Barn Candle Company, Lane Bryant, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria's Secret.

I think the title of "oldest money" has to go to Anita Goldberg Zucker of South Carolina, CEO of the Hudson's Bay Company. Zucker, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, runs the 344 year old company, the oldest continually operating commercial corporation in North America. The company was founded on fur trapping. I could neither confirm nor deny the rumor that the original company motto was "Leave it to beaver."

Some would say that all this money is dirty, but in several cases, that is literally as well as figuratively true. Harold Hamm of Oklahoma is not just an "oilman," but a shale oil man. Hamm is the 13th and youngest child of Oklahoma cotton sharecroppers, and went from pumping gas to owner of an oil exploration and production company. His highest level of education is a high school diploma, but he holds honorary degrees from Northwestern Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma.

Shale oil exploitation involves the use of controversial hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," practices. In 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney named Hamm as his energy adviser.

People do not become billionaires without force of personality. Driven, dynamic, focused, complex, and many other attributes can be used to describe aspects of their characters. Take Pierre Omidyar, a French-Iranian-American, who resides with his wife in Hawaii. The Paris-born son of a linguistics professor and a surgeon turned his interest in computers into a company called eBay.

Then there is that one in fifty that earns something more valuable than money - respect. That is what I felt for James Goodnight of North Carolina. His bio refers to him as an Entrepreneur, CEO, Statistician, Software engineer, and Inventor. He started at an early age working in his father's hardware store, and demonstrated an aptitude for mathematics and chemistry. Goodnight remarked on a computer course he took in college, "A light went on, and I fell in love with making machines do things for people.”

He worked at a company that built electronic equipment for the ground stations that communicated with the Apollo space capsules. He went on to earn his PhD with a thesis titled, "Quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components in linear models with an emphasis on the one-way classification."

Goodnight then initiated a project called SAS (Statistical Analysis System) Institute to analyze agricultural data. He found that the SAS software and algorithms could be applied to quantifications beyond corn yields and bushels of soybeans. Goodnight grew the company from first year billings of $138,000 in 1976 to almost two and a half billion dollars in revenue in 2010.

Perhaps most interestingly, Goodnight developed a corporate culture based on four pillars: "help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually challenged and by removing distractions; make managers responsible for sparking creativity; eliminate arbitrary distinctions between 'suits' and 'creatives'; and engage customers as creative partners to help deliver superior products." In 2004, Goodnight was named one of America's 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine.

Even within the list itself, I found vast differences in wealth. At the "low" end is Alaskan capital investor, Robert Gillam, with a paltry net worth of $700 million. And at the top of the heap is our old friend from the great northwest, William Henry Gates III, or Bill to his friends. Gates' personal fortune is estimated at eighty billion dollars. That's an 8, folks, followed by ten zeroes (not counting the two after the decimal point).

Even this staggering sum falls short of the wealth controlled by the Walton family, and I'm not talkin' John Boy here. The three scions of the retailing behemoth founded by Sam Walton also made the list. Son Jim (AR), daughter Alice (TX), and widowed daughter-in-law Christy (WY) clock in together at a cool 108.9 B. Christy is currently ranked as the richest woman in the world.

Now that's great value.

You can find the fascinating interactive map at:

http://www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/wealthiest-person-map