It cost him billions and nearly caused a panic It had to be a Texan, of course. Who else could head a small investment
group that loses $1 billion on paper in a single day and still has
perhaps $2 billion left after that? A Saudi, maybe, and in fact there
were three Saudi Arabian colleagues plus a Brazilian. But their leader,
the man who shook the world’s commodities markets and almost caused a
financial panic last week, is an archetypal Texas wheeler-dealer,
Nelson Bunker Hunt. He does not look the part. A 225-lb. man of 54, Bunker Hunt dresses in
inexpensive brown suits, though he bridles when they are called cheap
. He neither
smokes nor drinks, drives himself to work in a 1973 Cadillac, and lists
his phone number openly in the Dallas telephone directory. His taste in
food is plain. Says one associate: “He is the kind of guy who will
order chicken-fried steak and JellO, spill some on his tie, and then go
out and buy all the silver in the world.” Not quite. The Hunt group’s own figures indicate that last week it owned
only two-thirds of all the commercial silver that is not in government
or industrial users’ hands. But Hunt is surely the biggest commodity
speculator in the country. He has been accused in the past of trying to
corner the market in soybeans as well as silver. He has also made and
lost fortunes in oil, directs the Hunt family’s control of one of the
nation’s largest sugar-beet processors, and owns what may be the
world’s largest stable of race horses . Altogether, his activities
would doubtless please his late father, the legendary oil billionaire
H.L. Hunt. H.L. was a one-of-a-kind eccentric, a penny pincher who brought his
lunch to work in a brown paper bag, a health faddist who crawled on all
fours as a form of exercise, a gambler who sometimes had $50,000 riding
on a single afternoon’s sports events. Says Bunker of his father:
“We never disagreed on anything much. I was the student, he was the teacher and I never argued much.”
Bunker says the main lesson that he learned from his father was
“in business, you should risk a little with the potential to make
a lot, not vice versa.”
