The $150B dollar business hiding in plain sight
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Who are the Cargill family and how did they build a $150B private empire?
When I Googled this family, the words came up were silent dominance. Middlemen at planetary scale.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never look back.
All right, Sam, I have a Billy of the Week for you, an MFM classic. This is not just any Billy of the Week. This is one of the biggest Billys in America, one that I wasn't really that aware of. I think you will know more than me about this, but I would say most people don't. Wait, can I guess? Let me tell you three things about it, then you can take a guess. Okay. All right. It is the largest private company in America for the last 40 years. It is owned 88% by the family and has produced more billionaires in one family than any other company ever. They do more revenue than Goldman Sachs, Nike, and Starbucks combined. Ooh, is it Mars or Coke? You're in the right neighborhood. Estee Lauder? Okay, you left the neighborhood briefly.
Come back to the other neighborhood of like sort of rich redneck families of America. It is Cargill. Oh, yes. So the Cargill family. So I didn't really know anything about this family. Can I just tell you a little bit about their story and what they do? Because this is a dominant business story of all time. Wait, first, tell me, why did this interest you?
Why did this catch your attention?
Remember when I was at your house and you were like, there's this closet here, by the way, that we found. There's this extra storage room that we didn't even know until we lived here for two months. That's how I felt finding out that one of the most wealthy families in America, and I don't know their story. That's how I felt. As the host of My First Million, I just felt like I needed to right a wrong. Okay, I understand. And by the way, how did I find it? There was a Reddit thread that was, tell me about billion-dollar industries that I probably don't know about. And it was like, the first one was sand, and the second one was this, and the third one is this. Reinsurance. It's like, well, there's insurance companies, and then they buy insurance.
That's called reinsurance. And then the reinsurance, guess what? They have reinsurance companies behind them. It's just insurance all the way down, baby. And so I was reading through this thread, and then one was Cargill. And I was like, oh, Cargill. So what they did, so the story is... Back in the day, as America was sort of getting its feet and railroads had been started to get built, farmers needed to offload their crops, their grain, and they needed to sell them. So they could either sell it individually, so the farm could try to sell individually to a buyer and figure out how to transport it there, or... they could work with a middleman. And so Cargill became the biggest middleman on the planet for basically just initially storing grain.
So they would go right next to where the railroad is. They would build what's called a grain elevator, which is basically a giant storage facility for grain so that it wouldn't spoil very quickly. And the farmers could come drop it off. They would get like coat check. They'd get an IOU that says, I will pay you when your grain sells. Or they would just buy it at a flat rate, like wholesale and be able to flip it. So you could choose as the farmer, which one you wanted to do.
This is what my father does for a living, by the way.
Oh, so maybe you should have known.
He does it with onions. Onions. But yes, my father's a broker. That's what he does.
Does he store or he just calls one size? Hey, I got 75 bushels of kilograms.
Well, it's fresh produce. So the storage is like a day. But yes, there is a place where they sit for like 24 hours before a truck comes and gets it. Yeah, but yes.
And what's interesting about this for me from a business perspective is you always hear this idea of like, you don't want to be the middleman. Oh, you can always cut out the middleman. And in this case, the middleman became worth more than everybody else. And actually, if you look at many businesses, you know, there's many businesses where the middleman becomes quite a valuable business.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Who are the Cargill family and how did they build a $150B private empire?
0:00–4:27
2
How did Cargill evolve from grain elevators into global food and logistics dominance?
4:27–35:27
3
What controversies and 'dark side' issues have followed Cargill's growth?
35:27–40:39
4
What is the difference between 'projects' and 'empires' in business strategy?
40:39–51:58
5
How can family meetings and governance create lasting business dynasties?
51:58–52:52