Part Two: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk
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How did H.L. Hunt start his journey to becoming the richest man?
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And this week, we are about to start part two of our episodes on the former richest man in the world, H.L. Hunt. And when we left him off, his dad and his beloved older brother had just died. He had been saved by a magical prostitute after proving supernaturally good at sex. And he's in Arkansas starting a farm, you know, using the money he'd inherited and the money he'd taken from fleecing all of his friends at poker. He is going to try to make something of himself.
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So by the start of 1912, our boy Haroldson Lafayette Hunt had opened his very own cotton plantation. Again, this is probably inspired by the fact that his father had kind of talked endlessly about how beautiful the South was and how great cotton farming was. Unfortunately, he's going to learn a lesson, which is that cotton farming sucks ass. And it's really hard to like get rich doing unless you own a bunch of people who you can make work for you for free. Empire of Continent History taught me that lesson very clearly. Yes, yes. When you have to like do your own work and pay people to help you sucks way harder, way harder. And he's going to learn that over the next few years. Right. He's also going to learn that the cotton market itself is incredibly volatile.
Right. And so from year to year, your harvest might not be worth what you put in to make it. And also like bad weather can fuck you, you know, if you don't have enough of a nest egg to survive it. Right. It's just a very hard lifestyle. Right. And this is where the fact that he starts he starts farming and immediately learns, oh, shit, it's really hard to make money cotton farming. This is going to show evidence of one of his most valuable traits. Right. Which is that he is not dissuaded by failure. A couple of times in his life, he's going to lose everything like three different times. He loses everything. and makes it back to ultimately get crazy rich. And if I were writing a LinkedIn post to appeal to a bunch of wannabe founders and CEO bootlickers, I'd end there, right?
Hunt bankrupted himself three times, and he never let it convince him to stop.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
How did H.L. Hunt start his journey to becoming the richest man?
0:00–12:09
2
What challenges did Hunt face while farming cotton?
12:09–19:00
3
How did gambling influence Hunt's financial recovery?
19:00–23:56
4
What role did Hunt's family dynamics play in his life?
23:56–34:07
5
How did Hunt transition from farming to oil speculation?
34:07–42:04
6
What strategies did Hunt use to accumulate wealth in the oil industry?
42:04–1:04:47