World’s richest man?

Press, 8 July 1976, Page 9

World’s richest man?

NZPA New York After the deaths of Onassis, Getty, Hunt, and Hughes, who is the richest man in the world?

Almost certainly, Mr Daniel Ludwig, aged 79, the American who put the supertanker on the high seas, writes Leroy Pope, of United Press International.

An unassuming, austere man, Mr Ludwig built his fortune after the Second World War through the development of tankers longer than football fields and bulk cargo ships which not only cut the cost of shipping, but loading and unloading.

His vast array of business interests include oil, miner-, als, large-scale cattie ranching, tree and other farming, and land development. He owns the Princess Hotel in Acapulco and a number of other multi-mil-lion-dollar luxury-resort developments in various countries. He also has other lucrative financial investments.

Although not a total recluse like the late Howard Hughes, Mr Ludwig has alwavs maintained such a low profile that when he sold S6om worth of Union Oil stock in a single transaction on the New York Stock Exchange a few vears * a <' flabbergasted Wall Street

dealers asked each other: “Who is Ludwig?” Until recently, he and his wife lived in a small house in Darien, Connecticut, where few of their neighbours had any idea of the size of his fortune. But the couple moved away, and even the local tax assessor professes ignorance of where he is now living.

Mr Ludwig has been described as taciturn, with little flair for conversation and few recreational interests. Executives of his companies, none of w-hich are publiclyowned, say that he is stern and exacting, and utterly unforgiving of negligence or mistakes of any significance.

Long ranked as the fifth richest man in the world behind Hughes, John Paul Gettv, H. L. Hunt and Aristotle Onassis, Mr Ludwig rose to the top of the list as each of the giants died.

Of all the American multimillionaires of this century, Mr Ludwig comes closest to being the Horatio Alger hero. He was born in 1897 in South Haven, Michigan, a descendant of a Hessian soldier who came to America to fight for King George 111 against George Washington’s army. The son of an unsuccessful real-estate broker, he began work at the age of ’O. A year later, he bought a wrecked motor-boat, repaired it. and went into

business for himself, renting it out.

Mr Ludwig’s fortune came slowly: he worked as dieselengine service manager in the Alaska fisheries for the old Fairbanks Morse company, and then took a small stake in the First World War by barging molasses fom New York to a Great Lakes alcohol plant serving the explosives industry. Then followed 20 up-and-down years as a shoestring operator of small coastal ships. His principal asset was his ability to save money by personally supervising the maintenance and repair of his vessels and their engines.

Although not a profes-sionally-trained naval architect, his personal contributions in the fields of shipbuilding and transport logistics have been enormous. He went to Japan after the Second World War, rented that country's largest navy yard, and put to work his radical ideas about building bigger and bigger tankers and other bulk cargo ships.

Through his efforts, the Japanese developed the largest and most efficient shipbuilding industry the world has ever seen — and Mr Ludwig became the world’s richest man.