In 2004, LUKOIL bought Getty Petroleum Marketing, which owns a network of 1,300 gas stations in the northeastern United States. And that was, as they say, “the end of the story,” because Getty Petroleum Marketing is virtually all that remains of the once powerful Getty Oil concern, which included more than 200 companies.

The founder of Getty Oil and its long-time president was oil tycoon, financial genius and once the richest man on the planet, Jean-Paul Getty. The future billionaire was born in 1892 in Minneapolis (USA, Minnesota), into a wealthy Puritan family. His father, George Getty, having started in the insurance business, succumbed to the oil rush that took hold of Oklahoma and reoriented himself to the oil business, steadily increasing his capital. In 1906, George Getty became a millionaire. Having reached the cherished milestone, the father turned his attention to his grown-up son and discovered with horror that he had long ceased to follow the Puritan principles adopted in the family: at the age of seventeen, Jean-Paul dropped out of school and began “wasting his life.”

At the same time, the resourceful, cunning and merciless Jean-Paul had an iron business acumen and great ambitions. The young Getty dreamed of creating an oil empire and, starting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, boldly moved to new regions, capturing new companies and spheres of influence. In 1916, Getty earned his first million dollars, and that same year his company moved to California.

Getty approached his victims slowly and carefully. Competitors did not immediately notice the mortal danger emanating from the tiny office located on the third floor of the George V Hotel in Paris. In this office, Jean-Paul spent 24 hours a day, sometimes forgetting about food and sleep. Getty did not leave his office for months - he bought concessions over the phone, and negotiated tax breaks with sultans and kings over the phone. He meticulously and around the clock directed his army of sales agents, brokers, geologists and a fleet of tankers. Getty's approach to competitors was simple: he absorbed them. And it is curious that each time the prey was several times larger than the predator.

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, Jean-Paul decided that he could truly get rich by abandoning exploration and focusing on buying mature oil assets. So when oil stocks plummeted, Getty turned into a stockbroker. He looked for companies that were trading below book value but had valuable assets. His first investments in other oil companies, however, resulted in million-dollar losses.
The stakes were extremely high. “I financed stock purchases with every dollar I had,” Getty said, “and every penny of credit I could get. If I had lost this campaign... I would have been left personally penniless and deeply in debt.” Getty's biggest target was Tide Water, an oil company controlled by Standard Oil. After several years of struggle, Getty finally achieved his goal - he absorbed the giant concern with the help of a behind-the-scenes maneuver. Moreover, the former owners of Tide Water for a long time did not even know about the existence of Jean-Paul Getty and his small company Getty Oil with a capital of only one and a half million dollars.

A quarter of a century later, Getty defeated the once all-powerful Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefeller clan. One of Getty's most profitable undertakings was the purchase of an oil concession in Saudi Arabia in 1949, which began to generate billions in profits in the 1950s. In 1957, Jean-Paul Getty was declared the richest man on Earth. By the mid-1960s, Getty Oil's profits were reaching fantastic levels. According to Fortune magazine, in those years Getty increased his capital by half a million dollars every day. In 1968, Jean-Paul Getty became a billionaire. He retained the high-profile title of the richest man until his death.

Touches to the portrait of a billionaire
The world oil and political elite hated Getty - primarily because he bought up the estates of bankrupt aristocrats on the cheap. “Paul Getty devours the corpses of bankrupts and unfortunate people,” Lord Beaverbrook once remarked. Jean-Paul Getty bought his English estate Sutton Place in Surrey shortly after the end of World War II from the impoverished Duke of Sutherland at a predatory price - only 600 thousand pounds. In those years, the oil tycoon earned that kind of money in two days. After the purchase of the estate and Getty moving there, the house was surrounded by a fortress wall. The territory was guarded by an entire army of security guards and twenty specially trained dogs.

Getty's trophies included not only absorbed oil companies and mansions bought for next to nothing, but also beautiful women. After the billionaire's death, stunned descendants found in his famous black notebook several hundred women's names, written in a column in alphabetical order. And opposite each name is an address. Paul Getty conquered the most beautiful women on the planet - film actresses, millionaires, princesses and baronesses, and was keen on underage girls... Getty was married five times, and his relationship with almost all of his children was very bad.

At the same time, Getty was a fantastically stingy person. He installed pay phones in his guests' rooms and paid taxes only once in his entire business career. And when his grandson Jean-Paul Getty III was kidnapped by Italian mafiosi in 1973, the tycoon refused to pay them a $3.2 million ransom. Only after receiving the boy's severed ear in the mail did he agree to hand over the money, but the police discovered the child earlier. Until the end of his life, Getty was convinced that the kidnapping of his grandson was staged by his cunning mother in order to force Paul Getty to fork out money... When the mutilated boy was released from captivity, Getty refused to talk to him on the phone.
Here's another revealing fact. When Getty's granddaughter and daughter-in-law Elizabeth Taylor died of AIDS, he didn't even send her parents a sympathetic telegram. Indeed, the fate of his children and grandchildren worried Paul much less than building an oil empire and perpetuating his own name.

Getty invested fortunes in works of art. In 1953, he founded the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, where he displayed much of his own art collection. In 1974, the museum moved to new premises in Malibu, which was an exact replica of the Villa dei Papiri in Tivoli. For the construction of the pompous palace, several tens of tons of golden travertine stone were delivered from Tivoli to California. The luxurious remodeled palace was framed by shady gardens with cascades of fountains and artificial waterfalls. The Getty residence in Malibu was turned into a unique museum, a repository of precious paintings, sculptures and antiques.
The paradox was that the owner of this untold wealth never saw it with his own eyes. Paul Getty supervised the construction from London. The tycoon could no longer cross the ocean: he could not stand transatlantic sea travel and was terrified of flying on airplanes.

Battle for inheritance
In 1976, 83-year-old Paul Getty died in his sleep. As Forbes magazine wrote, “the sin of self-interest and lust destroyed the life of Paul Getty and turned the vain American into the most unfortunate, lonely and selfish rich man on the planet.” Immediately after Getty's death, a protracted litigation began between his many heirs. The impetus was given by the announcement of the will, which produced the effect of a bomb exploding on the interested parties.
Paul Getty's four sons and fourteen grandchildren were completely demoralized and depressed: their father and grandfather practically disinherited them. Paul's sons received a humiliatingly pitiful pittance. Devoted servants - the head of security, a massage therapist, a doctor and a permanent secretary - little more. Getty bequeathed almost all of his billions to the Getty Trust, a charitable organization that owns the museum in Malibu, as well as the large Getty Center in Los Angeles, built in 1997.

Such a clear demonstration of love for art brought the children of the newly-minted philanthropist to the brink of bankruptcy. But this, as it turned out, was only the first act of the Getty family tragedy. He was followed by a second and a third.

The eldest son George, until recently a thriving businessman, owner of golf clubs and thoroughbred horses, was ruined by alcoholism. Growing up in constant fear of his almighty father, he committed suicide.

Getty's second son, Ronald, born from a marriage with a blond German woman, Fini Helmle, grew up away from his father and always believed that he hated him. “Even after his death, my father, like a ghost, invisibly participated in my fate,” Ronald admitted in an interview. From the wealthy owner of the Californian Radisson hotel chain, Ronald turned into a poor citizen of South Africa, wandering around the Bantustans in a mobile home on wheels. The late father almost finished him off by leaving Ronaldo in his will... his own diary with contemptuous remarks addressed to his son on almost every page.

The third son, Paul, went down in history as the “golden hippie from Morocco.” For a long time he lived in his African villa with the telling Arabic-French name Palais de Zahir - Palace of Passion. This villa on the outskirts of Marrakech became a hangout for dozens of wandering hippies: here in the late 1960s, hashish was added to cake cream and protracted drug orgies were held. However, the drug “idyll” in the Moroccan palace collapsed overnight: Getty Jr. became seriously ill and was placed in a closed clinic.

And Getty’s fourth son, who was just as passionate about money as his father, in 1984, without any hesitation, sold the elder Getty’s creation, Getty Oil, to Texaco for $10 billion. This was the actual end of the family oil business of Paul Getty’s “empire,” the remnants of which were absorbed by LUKOIL 20 years later.

The book “How to be rich” in a 10-minute reading format: reviews of the best books, only the most important and useful.

Jean-Paul Getty is a businessman who was named the richest man in America in 1957 by Fortune magazine. Getty compiled into a book a series of articles he wrote for Playboy magazine, where he talks about himself, the mentality of a millionaire, and exposes myths about what it means to be rich.

IN A NUMBER OF WORDS: Live by your own values, be yourself.

QUOTE: “In the end, wealth is a matter of character, of philosophy. worldview and position are no less than a question of money. “The millionaire mentality” is not only – in our time and at our age, even more so – the mentality of hoarding. A talented, ambitious person striving for success must understand that the word “rich” has an infinite number of shades of meaning. To justify himself and his wealth, he must know how to be rich in virtually every positive sense of the word.”

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Yulia Aleksandrovna Petrova, Elena Borisovna Spiridonova

Getty Jean-Paul (Paul) - oil tycoon

Jean-Paul (Paul) Getty (1892–1976) was the largest American oil tycoon, having the largest fortune in the world at the time of his death. His gigantic empire consisted of the largest oil giant - the Getty Oil company and more than two hundred concerns. Paul Getty was the owner of luxurious palaces, including the famous Paul Getty Museum, built in pseudo-antique style in Malibu, not far from Hollywood.

The foundation of the Getty empire was laid by his father George Getty; in 1903, he took the risk of buying a plot of land in Oklahoma for $500, on which oil was soon discovered, and in such quantities that George Getty founded his own company, Minneoma Oil Company, and by 1906 he became a millionaire .

Paul Getty became a shareholder in his father's company at the age of 11, purchasing shares with money raised from the sale of newspapers. Already from childhood, Paul developed extraordinary business qualities, for example, he developed the habit of recording his income and expenses in a notebook and keeping track of money. At just 20 years old, Getty had already demonstrated a fantastic ability to earn huge amounts of money and constantly increase it.

By this time, Paul Getty had graduated from two higher educational institutions - the University of California with a degree in geology and economics and Oxford with a degree in economics and politics - and in 1914 he appeared in Oklahoma to take part in the family business.

Having received $100 monthly allowance from his father, Paul managed to organize his own business. With Getty, the son enters into an official partnership agreement with his father, according to which the income from their joint activities was distributed as follows: 70% went to the father, and 30% to Getty.

They said that Paul Getty had vowed not to leave Oklahoma until he made his first million. We didn't have to wait very long. Within a year, he earned 40 thousand dollars from speculation in oil-bearing areas, and two years later, the long-awaited million. Getty was about twenty-three years old when he told his parents: “I just made my first million dollars, and believe me, it won’t be my last!” And indeed, the future billionaire had a continuous streak of fantastic success ahead of him. He had an incredible sense of money, was endowed with amazing intuition and an incredible instinct that allowed him to guess oil deposits. Even Getty Sr. heeded his son's advice when he recommended that he purchase a concession in Santa Spring, which everyone refused. This purchase turned out to be the most successful in George Getty's life.

And Paul Getty sought to create his own oil empire. With fanatical persistence, he moved towards his goal, tirelessly mining black gold both in the orange Texas soil and in the snow-white Arabian desert. His endless oil wars with the most dangerous and powerful competitors invariably brought Paul victory, new spheres of influence, and unimaginable super-profits.

The outbreak of the First World War at the beginning of the last century contributed to the development of Getty's business - oil prices increased sharply.

Paul Getty is one of the few in America who managed to get rich during the Great Depression. He said about his own financial success: “My tactics are very simple: I buy when others are selling.” In 1928, he bought out 33% of the shares of George F. Getty, Inc. from his parent. for 1 million dollars.

When an unprecedented economic crisis hit America in October 1929, Getty made a series of very risky acquisitions. The secret was that his father, George Getty, was never a stock player; he preferred to invest in land and real estate, so the Wall Street crash did not affect the Getty family business.

It was at this time that Paul Getty radically changed the strategy of the family business. Having sufficient amounts of money, Getty Jr. begins to buy up shares of large industrial giants, which have sharply fallen in price.

They like to compare Getty to a predator who slowly and carefully creeps up on its prey, not noticing the mortal danger that threatens it. Indeed, competitors noticed Getty when they had already lost the oil battle.

In a small office, on the third floor of the George V Hotel in Paris, the Getty Oil company, where Paul Getty worked for days, months, sometimes even forgetting about food, buying concessions over the phone, negotiating tax breaks with oil sultans and kings.

In twenty years, he managed to absorb half of the companies that competed with him. Moreover, each time the competitor’s company was somewhat much larger than Getty’s company, but this did not bother him at all, he. knew how to digest tasty morsels of any size.

One day, his target was the Tidewatter Associated Oil Company, which did not have its own oil wells, but owned several oil refineries, as well as a network of gas stations throughout America.

In Getty's opinion, the Tidewatter Associated Oil Company would be a great complement to a family corporation that owned oil but did not refining or market it.

Paul began buying Tidewatter shares at $2.50 a share, which had been worth $20 before the crisis. Soon the shares jumped to $10. Getty continued to methodically buy up Tidewatter shares over the next twenty years, during which time he invested $90 million in its shares.

While fighting for Tidewatter, Getty at some point found that his interests in this area collided with the interests of the Standard Oil Corporation, owned by oil magnate Rockefeller. It was in the hands of Standard Oil that the majority stake in Tidewatter was held. This came as a surprise to Getty, but it was too late to retreat. And Paul, with enviable persistence, began to send his agents to John D. Rockefeller Jr., and as a result, the stake that he owned ended up with Getty.

Thus, the giant Tidewatter concern was absorbed by Getty Oil, the existence of which the previous owners of this company did not even know about for a long time.

And a quarter of a century later, Getty suffered the same fate against the once all-powerful Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefeller clan.

In 1849, he bought a concession from the ruler of Saudi Arabia to develop a neutral zone between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The deal cost Getty $10.5 million in cash, plus additional payments of $1 million annually, and no one could say with certainty whether oil fields would ever open on this piece of desert. Getty spent another $30 million on exploration work, and only four years later fountains of black gold finally began flowing in Wafra, turning into billions of dollars in profits for Paul and making him the richest man in the world. Getty received this title in 1957 and retained it until his death.

By this time, he had surpassed Ford and Rockefeller in terms of the amount of money he earned.

Getty owned "George GettyJnc.", "Tidewatter Oil", "Skelly Oil Company", "Spartan Aircraft Corporation", "Getty Real Estate Company", "Minnechoma Insurance Company", "Getty Realty Corporation", "Pacific Western Realty Company" etc.

By the mid-60s, Getty Oil's profits had reached fantastic proportions. According to estimates from Fortune magazine, which annually publishes a list of the richest people in the United States, in those years Getty's capital increased by half a million dollars every day.

In response to attempts to calculate his wealth, Getty said: “A billionaire who can count his billions is certainly not one.” And one more of his phrases, which became a catchphrase: “If a person is really rich, it will never occur to him to count who is richer than him and who is not.”

In 1960, Paul Getty moved to England, to the Sutton Place estate in Surrey, which he bought from the bankrupt Duke of Sunderland. Here he continued to do what he had done all his life: buying what was sold. And the estates of bankrupt English aristocrats were sold in Foggy Albion, which Getty bought at the lowest price.

Lord Beaverbrook once remarked that “Paul Getty devours the corpses of bankrupts and unfortunate people” and this was largely true. For example, he acquired his ancient English estate Sutton Place simply at a predatory price - for 600 thousand pounds, in those years the oil oligarch earned this amount in just

Tom Butler-Bowdon

Jean-Paul Getty. "How to Be Rich" (1961)

“In the end, wealth is as much a matter of character, philosophy, outlook and attitude as it is a matter of money. “The millionaire mentality” is not only – in our time and at our age, even more so – the mentality of hoarding. A talented, ambitious person striving for success must understand that the word “rich” has an infinite number of shades of meaning. To justify himself and his wealth, he must know how to be rich in virtually every positive sense of the word.”

In a nutshell

Live according to your own values, be yourself.

In a similar vein

Warren Buffett (and Roger Lowenstein) "Buffett"

Thomas J. Stanley "Millionaire Mind"

How to Be Rich is essentially a series of articles commissioned by Getty from Playboy magazine. He intended to talk about himself, why he is a businessman, and also debunk myths about what it means to be rich. Hence the title of the book: “How be rich" and not "How become rich."

From “wild” oil explorer to tycoon

Jean-Paul Getty's father George Getty grew up on a poor farm in Ohio, but was later able to graduate from law school with the support of his wife. He became a successful lawyer in Minneapolis and became rich during the Oklahoma oil rush.

Jean-Paul was born in 1892 into a relatively prosperous family. He writes fondly of his teenage apprenticeship as a laborer in the oil fields, a very dirty area with rude people, “where gambling halls were considered the pinnacle of public goods.” To further contrast, he spent two years at Oxford University in the UK before returning to the States.

He planned to join the US Foreign Service, but at age 22 he started his own business as a wildcat (independent oil driller and salesman) and had luck on some leased wells. By the age of 24 he was a millionaire. Deciding to “retire”, he lived happily for a couple of years, but his parents were unhappy with this. His father told him that he must create and run businesses that will give people wealth and a better life.

The oil rush moved to California, and Getty decided to invest in new oil wells near Los Angeles. His business expanded rapidly over the next few years, but the death of his father in 1930 slowed growth. It was said that Getty Sr. left Jean-Paul $15 million. In fact, only 500 thousand.

Writing this book in the early 1960s, he correctly predicted that the “disappeared dissenters” would soon reappear.

During the Depression of the 1930s, Getty came up with the idea of ​​a diversified oil company covering exploration, refining and retail marketing. He bought crude oil, which was then very cheap, purchased the Pierre Hotel in New York at a negotiated price and began a long, 15-year acquisition of a controlling stake in the Tidewater oil company, which later became one of the largest in California. After World War II, Getty Oil bought $12 million worth of shares in oil concessions in Saudi Arabia. Although it took another four years and 18 million to develop oil wells, by that time the world had learned about the enormous oil reserves in the area, and the purchase paid off handsomely.

In 1957, Fortune magazine named Getty the richest man in America, with a fortune estimated at $1 billion. Since then, he has received an average of 3,000 letters a week from strangers asking for money.

Jean-Paul Getty's advice on how to achieve success in work and life

Make your own way

How to Be Rich was written at the height of the growth of large companies, when the "organizational man" evolved to make the most of his small corporate position. Getty described the man as "dedicated to maintaining the complex rituals of memos and passing the buck." Getty's "office" in his early years working in the oil fields was in the front seat of a broken "

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Tom Butler-Bowdon.

How to be rich. Jean-Paul Getty (review)

“In the end, wealth is as much a matter of character, philosophy, outlook and attitude as it is a matter of money. “The millionaire mentality” is not only – in our time and at our age, even more so – the mentality of hoarding. A talented, ambitious person striving for success must understand that the word “rich” has an infinite number of shades of meaning. To justify himself and his wealth, he must know how to be rich in virtually every positive sense of the word.”

In a nutshell

Live according to your own values, be yourself.

In a similar vein

Warren Buffett (and Roger Lowenstein) "Buffett"

Thomas J. Stanley "Millionaire Mind"

How to Be Rich is essentially a series of articles commissioned by Getty from Playboy magazine. He intended to talk about himself, why he is a businessman, and also debunk myths about what it means to be rich. Hence the title of the book: “How be rich" and not "How become rich."

From “wild” oil explorer to tycoon

Jean-Paul Getty's father George Getty grew up on a poor farm in Ohio, but was later able to graduate from law school with the support of his wife. He became a successful lawyer in Minneapolis and became rich during the Oklahoma oil rush.

Jean-Paul was born in 1892 into a relatively prosperous family. He writes fondly of his teenage apprenticeship as a laborer in the oil fields, a very dirty area with rude people, “where gambling halls were considered the pinnacle of public goods.” To further contrast, he spent two years at Oxford University in the UK before returning to the States.

He planned to enter the diplomatic service in the United States, but at the age of 22 he opened his own business as a “wild” oil explorer (independent oil

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