Latest news with #DavidMurdock
New York Times
a day ago
- Business
- New York Times
David H. Murdock, a Fierce Rags-to-Riches Corporate Raider, Dies at 102
David H. Murdock, who rose from hardscrabble beginnings to become a billionaire investor, real estate mogul, corporate raider and philanthropist, and whose late-in-life devotion to healthy nutrition once led him to announce that he planned to live to 125, died on Monday at his ranch in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 102. His death was confirmed by Tracy Murdock, his ex-wife. Mr. Murdock, who dropped out of school at 14 and was briefly a homeless World War II Army veteran, made his first fortune in real estate and then acquired controlling stakes in a variety of public companies, including Dole as well as the textile manufacturer Cannon Mills. He gained a reputation as a relentless and often ruthless turnaround specialist who didn't hesitate to lay off thousands of workers, slash benefits and make deep cuts in order to reshape and sell a company. He would look for companies with what he deemed 'undervalued assets,' swoop in, make necessary if painful changes and then sell the entity at a significant profit. In his oft-stated quest to build the largest private financial empire in the United States, Mr. Murdock took on powerful unions and dominant corporate chieftains, among them Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum, and emerged as one of the richest, most successful corporate investors in the nation. In April, Forbes estimated his fortune at $3.7 billion. Mr. Murdock's lack of formal education and humble beginnings fueled his determined rise to wealth and power. In a 1983 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he said: 'Nobody is satisfied with what he has. We were brought on earth to achieve. As long as we want to achieve, we're alive. If we're satisfied, we're already half dead.' Well into his 90s, he continued to achieve, serving as chairman and chief executive of Dole and its parent company, Castle & Cooke, for several decades. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
David Murdock, billionaire businessman who twice reshaped NC town, dies at 102
David Murdock, the billionaire businessman who reinvigorated the iconic Dole Food fruit brand, helped rebuild Kannapolis after the collapse of former textile giant Pillowtex, once owned a Hawaiian island and hoped to live to 125, has died. He was 102. A high school dropout, Murdock made his fortune through a hardscrabble ladder of ever-growing business ventures. He started with a diner, which he turned into a homebuilding business in Arizona, which he turned into an office-building business, which he used to buy stakes in major corporations, which would turn him into a billionaire. But for all his business success, late in life Murdock became intensely interested in health and wellness. In the 2000s, he financed the creation of the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis to study agriculture and wellness in support of this mission. The project, as well as other investments and philanthropy he made in the town, contributed to its recovery from the collapse of its textile industry, which he also had been a part of. Murdock died Monday, Dole Food stated on LinkedIn, stating: 'David H. Murdock stood apart — a singular force in American business — a self-made billionaire, visionary entrepreneur, and enduring advocate for health, longevity, and innovation. 'As our guiding star from 1985 to 2020, Mr. Murdock transformed the global produce landscape through bold investments, science-driven leadership, and an unwavering belief in the power of nutrition,' Dole Food said. The city of Kannapolis shared the following statement Wednesday with The Charlotte Observer: 'Mr. Murdock's investment in the North Carolina Research Campus was pivotal to the city's revitalization. The research, led by Duke, UNC-CH, UNCC, ASU, NC A&T, NC Central, NCSU, and UNCG, in the fields of health, nutrition, exercise continues to make a significant difference both in North Carolina and across the United States. 'Murdock's legacy of having eight universities in one location focused on these targeted scientific fields has been important in the understanding of how foods and exercise impact everyone.' The X account called How many days until David H Murdock 125th birthday on Wednesday, created in April to countdown the days until he turned 125, simply posted 'RIP.' Ventura County Supervisor Jeff Gorell in California said on X that Dole's philanthropy and health initiatives positively touched thousands of people. 'David helped me launch my local political career in 2004. His impact on Ventura County and the world will be forever felt.' Murdock was listed at No. 979 on Forbes' 2025 World's Billionaires List with a net worth of $3.7 billion. Born in Kansas City, Murdock grew up in Wayne, Ohio. He dropped out of high school at 14. After serving in the Army, he ended up homeless in Detroit at the age of 22, according to a 2011 profile of Murdock in the New York Times Magazine. A fellow veteran offered to help, and Murdock would use that assistance to buy a diner that he hung out at, which he flipped for a profit, bought a car and drove out west. In Phoenix, Murdock built a business building cheap homes for Americans moving west after World War II. The business eventually became a sprawling home and office building empire across the country, the funds of which Murdock used to buy up stakes in major U.S. firms. Murdock first appeared in the Charlotte area in the 1980s, when he bought Cannon Mills in Kannapolis. He quickly turned around and resold it to an entity that would become Pillowtex, but held on to a house on Kannapolis Lake called Pity's Sake Lodge. Ever since, he's had a close association with Kannapolis, investing millions in the town. In 1985, Murdock purchased Castle & Cooke, the colonial Hawaiian company that owned Dole, the fruit company which had fallen on hard times. He turned Dole around, which also coincided with a new personal obsession with living long life through a healthy diet. The death of his wife Gabriele from cancer in 1985 was the spark: 'If I had known what I know today,' about wellness, he said to the New York Times Magazine, 'I could have saved my wife's life. And I think I could have saved my mother's life too.' In turning around one of the world's biggest fruit and vegetable companies, Murdock began a parallel mission to finance research into long life through those same fruits and vegetables. Murdock once stopped by a fast-food restaurant, the type of place whose food he abhorred, the (Raleigh) News & Observer reported. He told people there: 'I eat only fruits and vegetables, nuts. ... I'm 91 years old, and I'm as healthy as any one of you there. That should be a good example of proper eating: fruits and vegetables.' That mission to tout healthy living ultimately would be conducted in a place that by the 2000s had grown to know Murdock well: Kannapolis. After Pillowtex collapsed, Murdock bought the abandoned mill site in Cabarrus County that he once owned at auction for $6.4 million. On it, he spent $500 million of his own money to build the North Carolina Research Campus, a center of scientific research looking into plants and wellness. Couldn't hurt the owner of a produce company, either. He brought academics from across the state and country to the former mill site, which he turned into an opulent set of mock neo-Classical buildings. It helped diversify the economy of Kannapolis, and spurred on other development in the downtown area. Twenty years ago, when Murdock first had designs to reinvigorate Kannapolis with his research campus, he invited a Charlotte Observer reporter to his Kannapolis mansion on Kannapolis Lake for a rare interview. The home was called Pity's Sake Lodge. When asked why he chose Kannapolis as the site for his ambitious dreams of a research campus centered on health and nutrition, Murdock replied, 'You can't live in an area, if you have any kind of a heart and soul, and not feel you want to end up adding something to that area.' He later added, 'I've tried to build the city up. I like creativity. That's the foundation of my entire business world, creating things.' Murdock called Kannapolis his second home, and the project he was about to publicly unveil 'the love of my life.' While sharing his vision, he also mixed a veggie smoothie that he insisted the Observer's reporter and reporter drink. Murdock professed not to know his total wealth, saying he only worried about having enough in his wallet on trips, and keeping quarters in his car's ashtray to feed parking meters. Around Kannapolis at the time, in 2005, he drove himself around town in a 1982 burgundy Cadillac. In public and private, he typically appeared in crisp, dark suits with monogrammed cuff links. And even his closest, long-time associates called him 'Mr. Murdock.' Murdock remained involved in even the most minute detail of his businesses, from helping the caretaker at Pity's Sake Lodge with a sheep struggling to give birth to deciding which flowers to plant at his developments. 'They sometimes call me a dictator, you know, but..., ' he said with a smile and a shrug. Murdock said he travels more than 200,000 miles a year, which enough to circle the globe eight times. And he's a self-described 'nut for coffee' who can down a dozen cups a day. Associates said he also occasionally would offer up a hymn or showtunes. Oh and that smoothie? It was a little heavy on the celery, but still fairly drinkable. Near the end of his life, he shrunk his empire even as his ambitions for life stayed grand. After nearly four decades overseeing Dole, he relinquished his leadership in the company when it merged with Irish firm Total Produce in 2021 to create Dole plc. That combined company is headquartered in Dublin, and has its U.S. headquarters in Charlotte. Once the owner of much of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, Murdock sold that, too. In 2012, he sold it to fellow billionaire Larry Ellison for $300 million. Murdock stepped back from his signature day-to-day involvement in the Kannapolis research campus in the 2010s as well. In September 2023, Forbes estimated his fortune at $2.3 billion. But in 2024, Murdock's wealth shot up to $3.4 billion, according to the annual Forbes list of the world's richest people, making for a 48% rise. Murdock ranked No. 949 on the list of billionaires in April 2024. A man who once told a magazine in the 1980s that 'All my life I've had one desire — to be No. 1,' turned into one who told the Observer iduring that 2005 visit to his home that 'I'm not a money-hungry man. I guess I satisfied that hunger quite a few years ago. My desire is to do things that are good for mankind.' Former Observer reporters Hannah Lang and Austin Weinstein, and Observer archives, contributed to this report.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
David Murdock, billionaire king of fruit and vegatables, dies at 102
In his astonishing rags-to-riches life, it seemed there was little David Murdock could not do by sheer determination. The billionaire financier who transformed Dole into the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables was a dyslexic high school dropout who made and lost a fortune by the time he was 40. He then moved to California to start again, becoming a mainstay on lists of the richest Americans. One of the few self-set goals that Murdock failed to meet was his plan to celebrate his 125th birthday. Murdock, who in his later years became a messianic promoter of exercise and healthful eating for longevity, died Monday at what he no doubt would have considered the premature age of 102, according to William Goldfield, a spokesperson for Dole Food Co., which Murdock led from 1985 to 2021. Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.7 billion at the time of his death. He was a longtime resident of Lake Sherwood in Ventura County. Well into his 80s, Murdock lifted weights several times a week, walked on a treadmill daily and drank smoothies made of 20 different kinds of fruit and vegetables including pulverized banana peels. He whipped them up himself in a Jack LaLanne juicer. His health proselytizing was both public and private. He spent more than $500 million of his fortune on a nutrition research institute in Kannapolis, N.C., as well as founding the California Health and Longevity Institute, a medical spa in Westlake Village ('to teach people to eat because they eat wrong'). He also wasn't shy about scolding dining companions who committed such sins as buttering their bread or not eating all their vegetables. 'People are afraid to have dinner with him,' his friend and physician Rolland Dickson told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. Murdock's immense wealth and business acumen came about with little formal education or social advantage. He was born David Howard Murdock on April 10, 1923, in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in the small town of Wayne, Ohio. His father was a traveling salesman. His mother took in laundry and scrubbed floors. She died from cancer when she was 42 and he was 17. He was raised in a household where 'if it wasn't cooked in bacon grease, it didn't taste good," a by-then vegetarian Murdock told The Times in 2006. At school his teachers told him he was stupid, and he believed them. He earned poor grades and dropped out after the ninth grade. No one recognized his dyslexia at the time. He went to work pumping gas and changing oil until he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He ranked the highest on an IQ test out of 1,500 men. During his World War II service, an army buddy shared his love of books and for the rest of his life Murdock never stopped reading. He said that he was lucky to be uneducated because he spent his whole life learning. He consumed everything from 'Think and Grow Rich' by Napoleon Hill to Shakespearean sonnets. When Murdock took over Dole, the first thing he did was to buy a stack of books on fruits and vegetables. 'There is nothing you can't learn reading. If you read the three best books on a subject, you'll know what you need to know,' he said more than once. At age 22, he was out of the service, living in Detroit, broke and jobless. He did his reading at a diner counter. A friend who worked there would give him free sandwiches. But the place was for sale and his meal ticket was about to run out. One evening he struck up a conversation with another diner at the counter. He told the man he was looking for a job and the man, who worked for a loan company, told him he should buy the little greasy spoon. With the man's help, he raised $1,200 and 18 months later, after fixing the place up, sold it for $1,900. Murdock would go on to develop projects around the world and own a string of corporations, but he always kept the single penny and the one nickel that were in his pocket the night his destiny changed at the diner. With $75 of the profit from the sale, he bought a car and headed to Phoenix. For 17 years, he built houses and office buildings, creating a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But the city became overbuilt and the housing boom went bust in the mid-1960s. Murdock had to sell almost everything to pay off his debt. 'I had all my eggs in one basket and didn't even know it,' he told the Wall Street Journal. At 43, he moved to Los Angeles to start over with what he could salvage of his fallen empire. He built homes and offices, but this time also bought companies. He specialized in undervalued corporations that produced basic goods such as bricks or towels. He could be ruthless in closing divisions and factories while in search of profits. Murdock even described himself as having a 'dictatorial streak.' In the early 1980s, he became the largest shareholder in Occidental Petroleum. He then tried to take over the corporation, famously battling with chairman Armand Hammer, who called Murdock a 'barracuda.' In 1984, Occidental paid a 40% premium on Murdock's stock to get him out — he left with a reported $100 million. In 1985, Murdock took over the nearly bankrupt Hawaiian real-estate company Castle & Cooke, which owned Dole, then a pineapple and banana producer, and the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Investors complained Murdock was incommunicative. He seldom gave interviews or detailed reports of his financial plans. 'I don't believe in going back to Wall Street and shooting my mouth off,' he told The Times. He split Castle & Cooke and Dole into separate publicly listed corporations in 1995, then took both private — Castle & Cooke in 2000 and Dole in 2003. Murdock returned Dole to public trading in 2009, then in 2013, at age 90, reacquired it as a private company. He later reached two settlements with former Dole shareholders who claimed he had shortchanged them in that deal. Along the way, he quietly turned Dole into an operation selling food products in countries across the globe. In 2012, Murdock sold his portion of Lanai, 98% of the island, to fellow billionaire and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, saying, 'I have learned in life that change is inevitable and can be quite positive when guided in the right direction.' In 2018, Murdock sold a 45% stake in Dole to Dublin, Ireland-based Total Produce Plc. for $300 million. In 2021, Dole returned to the market for its third run as a public company, and Murdock stepped down from its board. There were times when the change he experienced was the result of deep personal loss. In 1983, Murdock's wife Gabriele, well-known in the Southern California arts community, was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Murdock read everything he could on nutrition, trying to find a way to save her. She died in 1985 at age 43. He believed if he would have known about healthier eating habits earlier, he could have saved her, and his mother as well. Eleven months later, his oldest son, Eugene, died in a swimming pool accident after hitting his head at 23. Another son, David II, died in a Los Angeles car accident at 36. The corporate magnate slowly turned into a health guru with a populist bent. The same man who built the Regency Club, which for 30 years catered to the business elite in Los Angeles, took Oprah Winfrey on his weekly trip to Costco to show her viewers healthy shopping tips. For, though seeking longevity, Murdock also celebrated change. 'To step outside what you already know is the most exciting thing,' Murdock told the BBC in a 2010 interview. He credited his triumphs to being able to envision possibilities. 'When I look at something, I look not at what is there. But what could be there,' he said. 'In order to do the impossible, you must see the invisible.' Bloomberg News contributed to this article. Sign up for Essential California for the L.A. Times biggest news, features and recommendations in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
David Murdock, Longevity-Driven Former CEO of Dole, Dies at 102
David Murdock, a high school dropout who became a billionaire as proprietor of one of the biggest private corporate empires in the US, has died. He was 102. He died on June 9, according to William Goldfield, a spokesman for Dole Food Co., which Murdock led from 1985 to 2021.
