Mattu's Tax Loss Picks

[ergo sum]

“As a wildcatter, 95 percent of everything you do is failure – most holes are dry,” Anschutz recalled to the Topeka Capital-Journal on February 9, 2000, at his induction into the Kansas Business Hall of Fame. And after years of such failures, he finally made his first major oil strike in 1967 near Gillette, Wyoming. “Upon the discovery,” wrote the Journal, “he immediately bought the surrounding oil leases on credit [and] the next day, a spark ignited his entire field. He called in the famed firefighter, ‘Red’ Adair, who was reluctant to cap the blazing well without assurance of compensation.”

To save his strike, Anschutz displayed some of the remarkable ingenuity that would prove so beneficial to him throughout his business career. He quickly “contacted Universal Studios which was filming a story on Adair at the time, and sold them the rights to film his fire for $100,000, enough to assure payment to Adair and continue operations.” (The movie Hellfighters, starring John Wayne, was released in 1968.) Like his father before him, Anschutz then proceeded to make his first fortune in the oil business, discovering in the late-1970s, on a farm in northern Utah, one of the largest pockets of oil since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay.

In 1982, Anschutz sold most of his oil fields to the Mobil Corporation for the tidy sum of $500 million and began buying up railroad companies, beginning with the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad in 1984 and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1988. Indeed, Forbes magazine named Anschutz the country’s seventh richest man in 1984, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion, tying him with banker David Rockefeller and computer giant William Hewlett.

Demonstrating his ability, as one senior advisor once described it, to “see around corners,” Anschutz capitalized in the mid-90s on his railroad holdings to break into the new high-tech economy. According to Fortune, “he concluded that the Internet was creating a demand for specially switched networks of enormous capacity.” He thus proceeded to buy up telecommunications companies (such as Dallas-based Qwest) and use his railroad holdings to install fiber-optic cables along the rail lines themselves. When he took Qwest Communications public in 1997, Anschutz, as the principal stockholder, turned his original $55 million investment into $4.9 billion on paper.

http://www.kuhistory.com/proto/story-printable.asp?id=77