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Rich People From History Who Committed Shady and Evil Deeds

Khalid Elhassan April 12, 2022 36 min

rich people from history who committed shady and evil deeds

7. The Rich Brothers Who Came Up With a Batty Scheme to Get Even Richer

American oil tycoon H. L. Hunt (1889 – 1974) was one the world’s wealthiest men, with a lock on much of the East Texas Oil Field, one of the world’s biggest oil deposits. His sons Nelson, William, and Lamar – the last a founder of the American Football League and Major League Soccer – were also super-rich. Especially Nelson, who made a bundle from Libyan oil. However, Nelson Hunt became a crackpot, and feared US government conspiracy to steal his wealth. So to protect his fortune, he decided to buy a whole lot of silver, and hoard it in Switzerland.

Then he decided to buy all the silver, and persuaded his brothers to join him in a bid to corner the global market on it. By 1979, the Hunt brothers owned about half the world’s transportable supply of silver. The Hunt brothers went on a silver buying spree in the 1970s. When they ran out of money, they borrowed heavily to buy more silver. By 1979, they had accumulated about 100 million troy ounces – almost 7 million pounds – of the stuff. That was almost half the world’s transportable supply. Then they discovered that they had made a catastrophic miscalculation.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.