Billionaire Profiles: How Would You Have Handled This?

Billionaires have quick reaction times to both opportunity and crisis.

Here's a great story from Martin Fridson about the importance of quick reaction time to crisis. Future billionaire Phillip Anschutz was contract drilling for Chevron in 1968, when a spark from a truck set his entire field ablaze.

Anschutz found himself facing ruin as he had borrowed heavily to secure the lease. The average person watching his capital go up in smoke would have been forgiven for curling up into a ball on the floor and going catatonic. Not Anschutz. What he did was quickly buy the lease of his panicked neighbor by assuming his liabilities and then raising $100,000 by selling Universal Studios the rights to film his burning oil rigs for their film Hellfighters, which had John Wayne playing the famous oil field fire-fighter Red Adair. The money allowed him to then hire the real Adair to put out the fire. In the end, Anschutz realized a "healthy profit."

How would you have reacted if that had been your oil field?


"Living well is the best revenge." – Oscar Wilde

"When I die, I want to come back as myself." – Mark Cuban

Second chances are rare man, you should learn to take better
advantage of em’. – anon

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Comments

[Claudio Nardo]

I probably would have sobbed like a girl not invited to the prom.

[Tom]

The really gutsy part was taking over the neighboring lease, if you ask me. I might have come up with the idea of selling the film rights, but not the lease buyout.

[Parker]

It's called mindset. And, it's why they can react, or if ruined, they can also make-it-back. Leaders must have four qualities: vision, courage, ethics, and be reality based. Anschutz is good... Focused and "lucky."

BTW: The only self-made billionaires within a single industry come [interestly enough], from HBC and Apparel categories.

[Stephen Elmore]

What do you mean by HBC? I work for a company in Apparel category, but am not familiar with this designation.

[Stephen Elmore]

Great story! I love to tell inspiring stories, and to encourage folks when adversity strikes them. And the quotes will be useful also.